part0021

The in-spirit-ed organism of wetiko is a field phenomenon, and can only be seen when we snap out of the illusion of imagining we exist as a separate self and recognize and become conversant with the deeper underlying and more fundamental nonlocal field in which we are all indissolubly interconnected. The field is the intersection of the collective unconscious and each individual’s personal subjectivity; it is “in between” these two, while being the same as neither yet including both. In modern physics, the field—the invisible organizing principle of the universe—has become more fundamental than matter. “The field,” as Einstein once succinctly put it, “is the only reality.” It bears repeating: instead of relating to any part of the field as an isolated entity, it’s important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the “medium” through which wetiko manifests itself. The Native American concept of wetiko disease is a social phenomenon, a relational dynamic of the field itself that cannot be understood, and does not exist in isolated individuals apart from the social milieu in which they move, interact, and have their being. For social creatures such as ourselves, self-identity is never simply given; it is forged in the crucible of interaction with others. Seeing the nonlocal field drives a stake into the very heart of the prevailing scientific, materialistic perspective, which ironically enough, still attempts to see the world as “machine. ”

Seeing the field, and stepping out of the perspective that we are separate from each other, converges into being the same experience. Seeing “through” the illusion of the separate self, rather than seeing “through the separate self” as a lens through which we view the world, entails recognizing that even the full-blown Big Wetikos, the master predators themselves, are not separate from us. Big Wetikos are fully embodying, in personified form, a pathological tendency that exists in potential within ourselves. Their madness is truly a reflection of our own. It is as if they are the externalized materialization of this potential within ourselves that we’ve projected outside of ourselves and collectively dreamed up into manifestation. Recognizing this generates compassion for this part of ourselves. It is only through compassion that we immunize ourselves from the virus.

Paradoxically, although wetiko disease doesn’t exist in isolated individuals separate from the field, someone taken over by the wetiko bug, though merely its instrument and not, in the ultimate sense “who they are,” can be said to be “the incarnation” of the disease in human form. The person so possessed (think of George W. Bush as one example, as I did in my first book) is the “revelation” of the pathology in living flesh and blood. The person so stricken is showing us, in fully embodied, personified form, the underlying infrastructure and dynamics of this transhuman disease. When someone is so possessed, they are the local crystallization “in form” of a nonlocal, and ultimately “formless,” phenomenon. The person taken over has been dreamed up into materialization to be a living, breathing symbol of the nonlocal disease, an embodied reflection of an archetypal, and pathological, aspect of ourselves. Recognizing this is to realize that this person doesn’t exist as an isolated, discrete entity, a skin-encapsulated ego, separate from the surrounding field. Seeing the person so possessed in their true context—as literally inseparable from all of us—becomes a portal through which we can refine our inner vision and see through the transparent illusion of the separate self. That the person so taken over is not separate from the field is a reflection of our own condition; seeing the other’s transpersonal nature enables us, likewise, to not personalize ourselves .

Holographically enfolded within the psyche of every human being, the wetiko virus pervades and underlies the entire field of consciousness, and can therefore potentially manifest through any one of us at any moment if we are not mindful. Who among us has not been guilty of being a channel for the evil of wetiko at one time or another? Who among us has not fallen asleep and unwittingly acted out our unconscious in a way that was hurtful to others or to ourselves? Unlike Big Wetikos, most people simply incarnate the disease locally, within our personal sphere of influence, which is usually our family system and within our own minds. We’ve all had our “wetiko moments.” That’s just the way it works. Recognizing this cultivates humility, which helps to psychically immunize us from the pernicious effects of the disease. This realization ultimately collapses the boundary between those who have the disease and those who don’t. Wetikos’ nonlocal nature makes the question of who has the disease irrelevant, as we all have it to varying degrees, or more accurately, it has us. We are all in the soup together, which is an insight that engenders compassion. This realization means that we can’t blame anyone else—on the one hand, we alone are ultimately responsible for our experience of ourselves, while at the same time, there’s nothing else to do but to forgive. This does not mean, however, that the Big Wetikos are not ethically, spiritually, and legally responsible for the unimaginable carnage they cause.

The primary line of distorted code through which the wetiko virus deviates our mind is the presumption of the separate self. The unreflected-upon acceptance of the axiom of separation is what makes all of the other delusions that make up wetiko possible. Seeing the diabolical nature of the disease entails realizing that it is the bifurcating “us” versus “them” duality which splits the world into opposites, that is itself the generative root of the wetiko germ. Creating duality out of something that is inherently, seamlessly nondual is as impossible as trying to separate heat from a flame, wetness from water, or sweetness from sugar. In the same way, we can’t separate ourselves as the observer from the universe that we are observing. Buying into the presupposition of separation plows fertile ground for wetiko’s seeds to flourish .

This book began by our shared act of invoking the spirit of wetiko in order to conduct this inquiry. As we shed light on wetiko, we become sensitized to its movements within ourselves. At this point the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, for there is no place for the spirit to hide. We are in a position of having access in our lucid, self-reflective awareness to a sacred vessel which can nourish the very spirit which is to be venerated. To come full circle and successfully accomplish the original, healing intent of our magic ritual, the hidden, powerful spirit of wetiko needs to be “contained”; this is the archetypal point behind the alchemical idea of a sacred, mystical vessel which transforms the entire universe.

As people who are becoming wise to the wiles of wetiko collaboratively help each other to step out of the illusion of separation, a psychic alchemical container that is greater than the sum of its parts gets created (please see the Appendix: Wetiko-Dispelling Communities ). This holy grail–like vessel of collectively shared lucidity is reciprocally conjured up through our shared realization. This higher-dimensional mystic container is forever stimulating lucidity, as well as stabilizing and strengthening itself in a positive, “over-unity” feedback loop. The system is “over-unity” in the sense that more energy comes out of than goes into the system. This “breakdown” of the illusory walls of separation is at the same time a “breakthrough” into a world of shared recognition, which gives birth to a constant outpouring of abundant, radiant energy inspiring, evoking, and being inspired by the creative spirit. This jewel-like higher-dimensional entity composed of the crystalline force of consciousness itself is a lucidity generator that is tapping into the zero-point energy of the mind, a form of higher-mind technology that attracts and dreams the universe into itself. This is to say that the open heart of lucid awareness incorporates itself in the world, while at the same time incorporating the world into itself. “Lucid” (a word which etymologically speaking, is related to “light”) awareness is the polar opposite, energetically speaking, of what a “black hole” symbolizes. Instead of “disappearing” and imprisoning energy like a black hole, lucidity’s enlightening energy nonlocally “appears” throughout the field, offering its stimulating gifts to whoever is open to receive its liberating effects. As compared to a black hole, lucid awareness is like a “white hole” or rather, a white “whole,” omni-directionally and nonlocally emanating radiant awareness throughout the entire field of consciousness. Liberating experience to spontaneously unfold creatively, lucidity is a truly creative act in that it is actively participating and consciously engaging in the co-creation of the universe with itself.

When we recognize that we exist not apart from, but relative to, each other, our connection with each other is “hermetically sealed” with the stamp of Hermes. We then relate to each other such that none of our projections unconsciously leak out into the world, for the simple reason that the world is recognized to be our projection. This realization bonds us together, uniting us with the world, each other, and ourselves. Becoming “tight” in this way, we are “blessed” by the master magician Hermes/Mercury, god of the sacred art of alchemy. Tapping into what is called the “quantum vacuum,” a field of living energy with nearly boundless potentiality, luminosity, and sentience, we become conduits for the over-unity technology of consciousness itself. We become “over-unity humans,” what the visionary Swedenborg calls “the Divine Human” (in Latin, homo maximus ), who step into and incarnate the part of ourselves that is a creator. Empowered, we are able to trans-fix, trans-mute, trans-form, and liberate the vampiric spirit of wetiko, while simultaneously snapping out of our en-trance-ment of ourselves.

The evil that is manifesting in our world is an expression that light is nearby, just as shadows are themselves expressions of light. A strong light is the best shadow-projector; in the source of light there is darkness enough for any amount of projections. We tend to think of shadows as the absence of light instead of one of its manifold expressions. Only when the full light shines in the darkness is the full intensity of the darkness made manifest. Joining the shadow with its light is, spiritually speaking, to be in possession of great wealth. A medieval proverb says, “Light over darkness is the Antichrist; Light through the darkness is the Christ.” Light is ultimately revealed through darkness; it needs darkness, for otherwise, how could it appear as light? Light only has meaning when it illuminates something dark; our inner realization isn’t worth much if it doesn’t help us recognize the darkness within us. Knowing our own darkness gives us the best opportunity for dealing with the darkness of others. Lucifer, “the bringer of light,” is the necessary dark side of life, of shadow revealing light by contrast, who was indispensable for the unfolding and completion of the divine drama. We like to imagine that God is all light, but St. John of the Cross, the author of The Dark Night of the Soul , posits the truly psychological notion that the darkness and seeming remoteness of God is, rather, an effect of the divine presence. Based on overwhelming empirical evidence, it does not seem to fit God’s plans, so to speak, to exempt humanity from conflict and hence from evil. In alchemy, the most evil figure, the very creature of darkness itself, is destined to become the medicine. The darkness of the unconscious stands in a secret, compensatory relationship to us, supplying everything we need for awakening to our wholeness. It is helpful to remember that it is darkest right before the dawn. In a demonically inflated dementia, a final, fatal, and narcissistic frenzy of attempted control, it is in the moment right before a demon is vanquished that it makes its worst stink and unleashes its most destructive and toxic outburst.

To initiate the resolution of our current dilemma, what is needed is the slightest shift of focus in our vision. It is as though our fingers are one key to the right of where they’re meant to be on the computer keyboard. When we type, what comes out looks illegible and hopeless, a terrible mess. We might not even know where to begin to fix our seemingly overwhelming problem. As long as our fingers are on the wrong keys, any intervention we make to rectify our situation only makes it worse. In reality, all we need to do is make the slightest little adjustment, and our seeming problem is resolved; now all we have to do is invest our energy into what we want to create. Our situation is similar; we just need to make the slightest little change in our perception of what’s happening, and our entire situation can be transformed .

We must continually invent new alarm clocks to keep pace with the rapidly evolving systems of control embedded both within our culture and within our own minds. These control systems have a built-in damage control factor which quickly mobilizes to shut down any fissures in the fabric of the illusion. Much to our advantage, spiritual alarm clocks, natural stimulators of lucid awareness, spontaneously precipitate into and out of the dreamlike nature of the universe reflecting, expressing, and revealing the totalitarian psychosis called wetiko. This is to say that at the same time that wetiko is destroying us, it is simultaneously—potentially—waking us up. Everything depends upon if we recognize what is being revealed to us, and how we respond. The choice is truly ours.

We capture within ourselves and truly “see” the nature of wetiko disease—“ Vampire/Cannibal Psychosis ”—when we realize that, just like in a dream, its full-bodied manifestation in the world theater is a reflection of a process going on deep within our very soul. We are all dreaming up the wetiko epidemic together. Seeing through our experience in this way gives world events a certain transparency, as well as rendering us transparent to ourselves . Seeing through ourselves, and having borne the dark side of ourselves, we are no longer delivered up to the darkness to the same degree. This intimacy with ourselves enables us to step into and embody a role in the field of being like “psychic T-cells” that help to heal the malignant cancer in the collective body politic of the world soul. For it is only when the immune system of the host, which in this case is the collective psyche of our species, is malfunctioning that the pathogenic wetiko parasite can penetrate the cell wall. Human consciousness and imagination are rapidly evolving to function as the earth’s “lymphocytes,” the planet’s white blood cells, who can potentially come together so as to heal the illness that is infecting the global body politic. A novel emergent behavior is spontaneously arising through and within our species in which the whole is revealing itself to be greater than the sum of its parts. As if fostering divinity to blossom in human spores, seeing the dreamlike nature of the world helps to generate a culture and climate of compassion, which is the “wetiko dissolver” par excellence. Compassion is a nonlocal force of immense healing and whole-ing power that should not be discounted nor underestimated. When necessary to protect life, however, compassion can set a firm boundary and display itself in the most fearsome of ways. This is not an airy-fairy notion of compassion form-fitted into our preconceived ideas of what being spiritually compassionate looks like; Christ, for example, was the very embodiment of compassion, yet he fiercely chased the money-changers out of the temple.

While acting itself out through us, our collective psychosis is simultaneously showing us something important about ourselves. To recognize how the collective psychosis of wetiko cultivates itself through our unconsciousness of it transforms us from being part of the problem to embodying the solution. Encoded in the collective psychosis is a deeper process which potentially awakens the participants, that is, all of us, to wake up to how we are all unwittingly participating in the “insanity” playing itself out in the world. This realization enables us to connect with each other “in sanity,” becoming islands of sanity in an ocean of madness. Over time the islands in our archipelago of sanity join with each other and form continents, so to speak, as we dispel the madness in the field. This is similar to when, in a dream, a number of characters in the dream become lucid and, I imagine, realize that they can connect with each other and cooperatively and act-ively put their lucidity together such that they can transform the dream. We, in this mutually shared waking dream, are in the very same situation right now, in this very moment. In a (r)evolutionary moment in time, we are invited to participate in our own evolution. Our expanding consciousness is simultaneously the cause and result of this evolutionary process.

One individual having the realization of the symbolic, dreamlike nature of our situation makes it easier and more accessible for others to have the same realization, for we are all non-locally connected. Any one of us self-reflecting might be the very grain of sugar that tips the scales and catalyzes the field into a higher order of crystallization, initiating a phase shift in the collective consciousness of humankind. The hundredth monkey’s realization precipitates a telepathic expansion of consciousness in the entire species. Like the symbolic number 144,000 in the Book of Revelation, if enough of us wake up to what is being revealed, we act as so much yeast in the dough, so to speak, helping the bread of this universe to leaven successfully. We are then in a position to avert a potential catastrophe and experience second-order change, which is not a change within a given system, but is an evolutionary up-leveling of the very system in which we find ourselves.

From the point of view of this being a dream, you have dreamed up these very words to potentially awaken you. As I am writing these words, I am being dreamed up by the you who is reading them, in this very moment, to write them. In a true collaboration taking place outside of the three-dimensional space/time continuum, it is as if the you who is in this moment reading these words is a future part of myself, reaching back in time and influencing me in the present to write them in this particular way. We genuinely connect with each other through our particular present moment in time as writer and reader in such a way that collapses and transcends time, as if we are meeting outside of time. Or so I imagine. Just like a dream, these very words—continually pointing out the dreamlike nature of the universe—are simultaneously an expression of the very dreamlike nature at which they are pointing. These very words are your own mind manifesting in exactly this way so as to help you awaken. And being like a dream, if you see it this way, “Abracadabra,” 1 so it is. The power of the Word has everything to do with our own intrinsic, God-given power, as we are the co-dreamers of the dream. Anyone awakening to the dreamlike nature in this moment could, and does, in actuality, change everything. We are the ones who give meaning to and create our experience. We are the one. When we come together in lucidity, WE are the living antidote to ME disease.

“You may say I’m a ‘dreamer’ ” when I profess these seemingly idealistic and naive beliefs. I will respond by quoting John Lennon, “but I’m not the only one.” There are ever-expanding numbers of us—millions growing into billions—around the planet who in various ways are being drafted by the Self to be channels for a deeper process of awakening, enabling a vast range of new, previously unimagined possibilities to become available to us. When enough of us recognize the deeper, archetypal pattern that is happening, that is, that the universe is waking itself up through us, we can “come together,” I “imagine,” and help each other to deepen and stabilize our mutually shared awakening, what I call “dreaming ourselves awake.” When we synergistically get into phase with each other, we endlessly co-inspire and replenish each other in a positive feedback loop that’s infinitely creative. Seeing our co-relatedness activates its full-bodied revelation, which in turn strengthens our seeing of it, ad infinitum. We can then heal our psychic blindness and help each other to see. All we have to do to see is open our eyes and look . It is within our capability to configure ourselves relative to each other such that we can dream ourselves awake. We are being invited by the universe to actively participate in our own evolution. As human beings, we are autopoietic agencies in co-evolution with ourselves as well as with the universe. When we get in sync with this deeper process, Lennon reminds us of what is truly possible when he sings, “the world will live as one.”

As wounded healers, shamans, dreamers, and multidimensional artists whose tool is the divine creative imagination and whose canvas is life itself, we can “conspire to co-inspire” each other to greater heights of lucidity, or so I imagine. We can activate our collective genius and collaboratively create what I call an “Art-Happening Called Global Awakening,” 2 a work of living art in which we can help each other to awaken. When the universe is recognized to be a creative and visionary work of living art, a true work in progress in which we are all participating, it becomes clear that no one fully wakes up until we all do, simply because we are all interconnected. In this light, anything less than a full and utter global awakening would be unsatisfying and miss the mark. The only limitation is our own lack of imagination, which is the very thing that is being revealed to us.