part0028

Wetiko is like a psychic Nautilus machine that is continually “working” us. This is similar to the way the forces of Mara, the Evil One, who attacked the soon-to-be-enlightened Buddha as he was meditating under the Bodhi tree, were actually a secret ally to Buddha, for Buddha wouldn’t have developed the muscle of realization without Mara’s challenge. Seen as a dream character in Buddha’s dream, Mara was an aspect of Buddha’s own consciousness that was dreamed up to play out this very unpopular, adversarial role so as to help Buddha become illumined. In a similar way, humanity’s highest virtues are called upon when confronted by evil. If the obstacles presented by wetiko didn’t exist, they would have to be created intentionally and invented, because it is by overcoming obstacles that we develop the higher qualities that we need. If we place a seed in the palm of our hand, for example, it doesn’t grow, but when that same seed is buried underground, it is inspired by the soil’s resistance to grow toward the light and actualize its potential. Encoded within the evil of the wetiko virus is its own psychic vaccine, a potential inoculation against our own ignorance and laziness, which if not overcome, will overcome us. The wetiko bug’s existence requires us to strengthen our muscle of discernment, lest we get “taken” for all we are worth. The virus demands that we cultivate impeccability within ourselves, or we don’t stand a chance. Wetiko tests us so as to make sure that we will make optimal use of our divine endowment. Wetiko literally demands that we step into our power and become resistant to its oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free, or else! Instead of a typical virus mutating so as to become resistant to our attempts to heal it, the wetiko virus forces us to mutate relative to it . It is as though the evil of wetiko is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence. This higher power, through the revelation and understanding of wetiko, connects us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves. The wetiko bug is the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known—as well as not known—to humanity.

Naming is a magical act, typically done when something new is born into our life. In our culture’s Judeo-Christian creation story (Genesis 1 and 2), the giving of names is at the same time a bestowal of existence. Like Adam naming the animals in the Garden, we have to name something before it can be seen, formally “discovered,” and brought into our shared collective cartography. In the Old Testament, naming was the first recorded human activity, the original “vocation” of Adam. It was only by naming these creatures that Adam could differentiate and distinguish himself from them and realize who he was. Traditionally, the way humanity has overcome the negative aspect of the daemonic is by naming it. In the New Testament, Christ calls out the name “Beelzebub” or “Legion” and the possessing demon is immediately evicted and exits the scene. The “pronouncing” and “recitation” of the correct name was sufficient to expel the offending evil spirit. In the Bible, the Lord says, “In my name they shall cast out devils” (Mark 16:17). The power of names is also shown in the Bible by the refusal to reveal one’s name (Exod. 3:14; Gen. 32:29), because those who know the name have power over those who bear it. Jung writes, “The act of naming is, like baptism, extremely important as regards the creation of personality, for a magical power has been attributed to the name since time immemorial. To know the secret name of a person [or a demon] is to have power over him.” 1 Etymologically speaking, the word “diagnosis” means “knowing through,” and is our modern form of finding the name of the offending demon.

It is to our great advantage to expand our psychospiritual fluency so as to enable us to navigate the living waters of the psyche. Language is not a fixed or static thing, but is an ever-evolving medium which is always in need of being updated so as to keep pace with and express our ever-expanding consciousness. Never a finished phenomenon, language, in a way of speaking, is a dynamic and creative activity which requires of us that our words, as well as ourselves, be continually born anew. Calling things by their proper name is a moral need of our species. By naming something we form personal meaning out of what was previously a merely threatening impersonal chaos. In essence, finding the name is symbolic of raising an unconscious content to consciousness. “Finding the name” for the higher-dimensional, virulent virus of the psyche we are calling wetiko helps us to more easily recognize it and get a “handle” on it, which is the first step in taking away its destructive power over us. Finding the name empowers us to creatively engage with these darker parts of ourselves that are emerging from the shadows “in the name of healing.” Seeing wetiko and calling it by its rightful name initiates a process that resigns it to the ranks of the unemployed, leading to the monstrous wetikonomy that it animates being put out of business. The energy that was being invested and bound up in feeding the wetiko pathogen then returns to nourish and be nourished by the creative wholeness of the psyche. An act of power, denominating something creates “currency” in the economy of the psyche. The process of naming something not only expels energies, but simultaneously invokes that which is being named, as routinely occurs in religious rites and ceremonies the world over. To name something is to spell it out, to call it out, which is an expression of an intrinsic, magical power that we all have within us. This is related to the Australian aboriginal belief that we “sing” the world into being—that we are creating as we name things. To quote anthropologist Misia Landau, “Language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language.” 2

To understand the meaning of and utter the name “wetiko” is a form of exorcism. Jung says, “For mankind it was always like a deliverance from a nightmare when the new name was found.” 3 Becoming conscious of and finding the name of wetiko is exorcistic in the sense that it is casting off the compulsive-autonomous nature of the underlying complex. It will serve us greatly as we introduce the word “wetiko” into our planetary dialogue, making wetiko part of our day-to-day vocabulary. By “planting” new words in our lexicon, we are letting living language take root in and through our interchanges with each other. Words are real things, a part of creation of which we are the instruments and guardians. Words have real effects, in that they affect thoughts and emotions, thereby inducing a change in the operation of the brain. Language has to do with meaning; a change in meaning evokes a change in our being. A living language can change the way we see the world, as it changes the way we “can” see, which is to say, it changes us.

Getting to know this psychospiritual disease of the soul in a personal and intimate way, regardless of what name we designate it by—wetiko or malignant egophrenia—puts us on a “first-name” basis with it. In “spell”-ing a word, we are casting a spell, calling forth a spirit, and creating a universe, all while discovering our power to name. In learning new, creative ways to express ourselves, we are dispelling the curse we were under of not being able to symbolize our experience. In divining the true name we de-“literal”-ize language, as we create language to “symbol”-ize our experience. The word “grammar” has the same root as the French grimoire , a manual for invoking and casting magic spells. The archaic word for magic is gramarye , implying that language itself is a conjuration of spells. In learning to consciously spell-cast, the world is no longer written in stone, with us as its passive victims, as we realize and tap into the creative and transformative power of the Logos, of the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Logos, which is the ground of language, creates the world through a kind of utterance. Speaking the world into existence, the agency of the Logos creates through the word; it is the Word of Being. It is the speech by which Being itself becomes a speaker and by which the manifest world comes into being. Language itself is the articulation of the very ground of Being. The esoteric meaning of the Logos—the Word—is that the Divine essence itself is concentrated in the name. The word wetiko, being a sacred name, is like a mantra, a word of power, in that the speaking of it empowers us, giving us a magical power over that which we are naming. As a sacred word, wetiko denotes and “signifies” something, which is to say that something is captured and anchored to consciousness when its name is found, which becomes a stimulator of awakening. “Let the word go forth,” in the most healing sense, and let us therefore “spread the word.”

A Chinese proverb says, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name.” We are only able to name “wetiko” when we see and register its nonlocal nature, both throughout the world and within ourselves. This can only be done when we become acquainted with our nonlocal nature, the part of us that is woven into both the evil of wetiko and the wholeness of the divine. As that great maxim of medicine states, “Do not attempt to cure what you do not understand.” The philosopher Socrates reminds us that if we want to understand something, we first must name it. Naming something means to find our experience of its nature within ourselves. Indigenous, wisdom-based cultures understand the exorcising power of finding the right name of a “demon,” which is precisely what they would understand the wetiko pathogen to be. An exorcist does not act in his own name; he invokes the Divine name. In the same way that nuclear weapons are an unparalleled means of physical mass destruction, the misguided development of the soul that is inspired by the demon of wetiko leads to psychic mass destruction on a collective scale previously unimaginable. The process of curing the human soul starts when we discover the name and understand the nature of the disease with which we are dealing. Jung comments, “The moment you can designate the lived archetype by its symbol, you feel relieved; that is a good and positive moment even if it is horrible.… Therefore old Egyptian medicine consisted in giving the thing the right name.… A new name always produces an extraordinary effect; we cannot rationalize these things, they cast a spell, they are symbols, they really do influence the unconscious as the unconscious influences us.” 4

As everything has two sides, there is a “shadow” side to naming, however, for the forces that are animating wetiko can usurp the solution in the service of perpetuating the disease. Though the original meaning of the arrangement of letters and the speaking of words and names was a magical one, these same modes of expression can be used to distance and separate us from that same magic. We should be aware that sometimes the act of naming can be used not as an aid for change, but as a substitute for it. This can play into modern humanity’s central defense, intellectualization, which would use words as substitutes for feelings, experiences, and action. Finding the words skates on the slippery slope of explaining away and thereby covering up the demonic instead of disclosing it.

Its simultaneously diabolical and mercurial energy makes the Native American idea of wetiko disease incredibly hard to capture in words. Jung comments, “But when something is little known, or ambiguous, it can be envisaged from different angles, and then a multiplicity of names is needed to express its peculiar nature.” 5 Whether we conceive of this trickster-like entity as a virus, parasite, tapeworm, vampire, werewolf, cannibal, or a demon, or call it wetiko disease or malignant egophrenia, doesn’t really matter. These various names are interchangeable, as they are naming one and the same thing. To quote a sixteenth-century alchemical text called the Rosarium Philosophorum , which is talking about the philosopher’s stone but whose words could just as easily be describing wetiko, “For however much its names may differ, yet it is ever one thing alone, and from the same thing.” 6 Having multiple names is an expression of a miraculous quality of that which defies being captured by any one name. There is no one definitive model for this disease, as each model has both its utility as well as its limits. When all of these models are combined and looked at together, it gives us a greater resolution and capacity to see what no one particular model by itself can reveal. In spreading “the” word, we are not necessarily spreading “a” single word, but rather, spreading a message of what certain key words such as “wetiko” and “malignant egophrenia” are representing and to what they are pointing. Let us spread not just one word, but many words, new words even, which is to say let us truly find and express the full range of our creative voice. Re-discovering the language of experience itself, the universal language known as art, we “find ourselves” in the process .

Finding the right name(s) invokes the sacred, creative, and transformative power of the “Word.” Wetiko is the “word made flesh” in its most depraved form. In finding the name, however, we are accessing the divinely sponsored power of the word to create an idea , a living psychic organism of real value and merit, with an intrinsic power all its own. Like a symbol crystallizing out of the psyche, an idea grows out of the dark depths of the unconscious like a lotus emerging from the mud. Ideas can be liberating, or they can be extremely destructive. Jung writes, “The most tremendous danger that man has to face is the power of his ideas [or lack thereof].” 7 New ideas, arising at the “right” time, have a magical effect by holding the destructive forces of the unconscious spellbound. Ideas are ways of regarding things, the means by which we see, as well as the perspectives through which we view the world. The word “idea,” etymologically speaking, has to do with both “to see” as well as “to know.” In other words, a novel idea opens our inner eye and helps us know by giving us insight into something previously unconscious. What Plato called the “eyes of the soul,” ideas are the modes of consciousness through which we envision and create our life. In finding the right name(s), we are impregnating and incubating a novel idea. Once we become more acquainted with the idea of wetiko and all that it entails, we can then give birth to and spread our meme by sharing it, as we create our own psychic anti-virus, a living antigen to the heretofore unrecognized mind-virus of wetiko. As Communist China’s Chairman Mao openly confessed, the one thing he was most afraid of was a new idea. For nothing is more powerful than a magical idea whose time has come.