Thursday, December 30, 2021

The Facebook Interview (revisited)


Recently, a Facebook friend named Adam Lee (pictured right) asked me a couple of questions about Facebook. Said he was writing an article on... well, Facebook! Thought I'd share my response with you...

Where do you think Facebook is heading?

Consider the unimaginable ways young people can find themselves becoming billionaires in the digital age: back in the mid-1990s Larry Page and Sergey Brin were 23-year-old computer studies undergrads at Stanford U when they stumbled on a new algorithm for a faster, more free-associating search engine called Google. Today each is worth USD16.7 billion.

Then there's Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook in February 2004 as an interactive social networking website for the campus crowd while he was in college. I hear Yahoo! offered Zuckerberg USD1.7 billion for Facebook last year - and he turned down their offer. Last I heard, MSN estimates that Facebook is worth USD15 billion.

My point is: these youngsters have been able to turn a simple idea into a complex income-generating engine by identifying two basic human needs, viz., the desire for information and the desire to feel connected. These desires are very much in alignment with the incoming frequencies of the Aquarian Age (the Water Bearer symbolizes the dissemination of wisdom acquired during the Capricornian phase of introspection and consolidation, and the Piscean phase of dissolution and disintegration of ancient taboos).

Today more and more people regard a laptop or tablet (and now smartphones) as an essential personal accessory. Instant messaging, virtually free text-messaging, Skype and a whole array of connectivity tools has been facilitated by advances in satellite communications that would leave our grandparents scratching their bald pates. This is what I call the age of server-assisted telepathy when a planetary mind is emerging from the preceding centuries of technological development. Buckminster Fuller, thirty years ago, called it "accelerating acceleration." By this he meant that quantum advances in technology would soon hurl us beyond the gravitational pull of the tragic past into a comic/romantic future.

Take Facebook's burgeoning popularity: within two years just about everybody I know who owns a computer, tablet or smartphone is on Facebook. My daughters and their far-flung network of cousins are now on my Facebook friends list. For the first time ever, the separate realities of family and friends are merging in cyberspace. And I just saw an interview with Zuckerberg taped in May 2007 where he quoted the figure 45 million as the total number of Facebook users - that was almost 6 months ago. I figure at least 250,000 new users sign up every day. In June 2017 Facebook hit 2 billion monthly users, making it the world's largest virtual community.



Where is Facebook heading? Who da fuck knows? Right now everybody complains that they're wasting too much time on Facebook (and a few months ago I was bitching about the same thing too) - but the reason Facebook is distracting people from work is that they're having more fun just playing with each other in harmless ways (try throwing a sheep at me in real life!) Friends I hardly get to see in real life are poking, tickling, cuddling, and loving me - albeit virtually but it sure feels nice! Hotties I've long wanted to meet give me cheap thrills by appearing in my inbox and adding me as their Facebook friend. Faces I haven't seen in 25 years are suddenly among my Top Friends! Wow... why ask where a party is heading when it's in full swing?

What's in it for you in Facebook? What's your story?

I live a long way from the city. In my younger days I was a real party animal. For me Facebook is a 24/7 party without the hassle of driving 3 hours, finding a parking space, and worrying about not getting laid. On Facebook you KNOW you're not gonna get laid because it's all make-believe, all a buncha pixels - but you can let go and sink your virtual teeth into that plump backside on some hottie's profile photo without getting slapped (except virtually of course)... and you can bite five pairs of buttocks at one go if you like. This is something I've long dreamed of doing. I've stopped cursing Facebook. In fact I've just written Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note. Hope he responds with a $50-million deposit in my PayPal account.

On re-reading the above in February 2018, the whole world has shifted into a different set of probable timelines. Recent revelations have unearthed the distinct possibility that digital megacorporations like Google and Facebook may well have been created by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an offshoot of the US Department of Defense). In effect, they could be products of the "Deep State" designed to effortlessly keep humans under electronic surveillance while our behavioral patterns are closely monitored by ultra-secretive agencies like the NSA, CIA, MI6, Mossad, ASIO and so on (ultimately these covert agencies transcend political ideologies and national boundaries and they all serve the same Central Nervous System (variously called Yahweh, Allah, God, Ialdabaoth, Artificial Intelligence, or the Archons of Fate). 

To me, Google and Facebook serve as useful tools - and tools are either benign or malevolent, depending on who uses them and towards what agenda. If you're paranoid, as many of my friends are who refuse to use social media and insist on sticking with email (even though they must realize that even text messages and phonecalls can be routinely intercepted and stored in gigantic databases like Prism (and now Palantir) - indeed, it is now known that software giants like Microsoft and Apple are ultimately extensions of DARPA and they all come with sneaky backdoors into their operating systems, allowing personal computers, tablets and smartphones to be turned against their owners as spyware.

[First posted 28 October 2007. Reposted 7 February 2018]



Wednesday, December 29, 2021

UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS DECLARATION (reprise)

Universal Human Rights Declaration
by Antares

There are two very basic human rights that are often overlooked. These very basic rights have far-reaching implications affecting the way we look at reality.

THE RIGHT TO LIVE

This right has historically been completely disregarded when those who wield hereditary power have decided to wage war. The military solution to economic, political or ideological conflicts is very rarely justified.

Warmongering is an infringement of humanity’s right to live by its highest ideals. All those involved in war activities - which includes the development and manufacture of death-dealing devices - must be regarded as potential killers.

Their thought-patterns and behavior can be classified as pathological. I would extend this classification to those engaged in commercial and industrial activities that have deleterious long-term effects on the environment - because the right to live implies the right to a healthy natural environment.

The Death Penalty is a vestige of moral barbarism and I urge that it be abolished throughout the world.

THE RIGHT TO DIE


Now let’s look at another basic human right: the right to die. All forms of drug addiction may be regarded as subtle ways to commit suicide. And although we do what we can to discourage people from terminating their lives prematurely, the final prerogative belongs to the individual.

We must respect the right of others to die, if they no longer wish to live. Therefore, I propose that all forms of drug addiction be decriminalized, and that drug addicts be regarded as potential suicides - and since the suicidal tendency is essentially a pathological condition, treatment or therapy must be freely provided to those who seek it.

I would like to see Malaysia’s mandatory death penalty for drug offences abolished. Stringent drug laws only serve to make the illicit drug trade more lucrative for criminal syndicates. Supply will drop dramatically – and, most likely, so will the demand - when addictive substances are available over the counter at regulated prices with the same quality controls as other consumer products.

Drug addiction may not disappear completely, but decriminalizing it will definitely relocate the problem where it belongs - in the medical, sociological and psycho-spiritual context.

[Drafted in December 1990 as a paper to be read out at a Human Rights Day event organized by the Universiti Malaya Law Faculty. Unfortunately, the organizing committee decided to drop me from the list of invited speakers at the last minute, after consulting with their lecturers. First posted 17 March 2010, reposted 29 October 2015 & 4 April 2017]

AISODONOLAH ~ another Manglish poem by Antares (repost)


Aitelyu ah, every year laif getting harder,
Not like lastaim so seemple one.
You remember ornot dat taim we all in skool
Honda Cub five hundred dollar can buy.
Now how much oridi? Five tausend over!
Becos of INGFLATION wat, dey say…
So whatever happen to INFLASI SIFAR hah?
Dis mins debladigarmen’s kempen for “Zero Ingflation”
Only add up to NUTTING pulak…
But aisodonolah…

De udder day my son come home from skool,
Say he nid computer.
Defler form one only, man,
Oridi want to so high-teck!
He say, nowdays got standard six buggers
Using word plocessor – Oi! Mamasan 2020, yutingwat!
So like a bladifoo I take de rascal to the IT Expo
And buy him two tausend linggit computer,
Summore got "Intel Inside" one.
Now defler as soon as he back from tiewshun
Oridi sitting like hunchback wid new video game: Taa-taaaa-taaaaaaang! Zoop-zooooop!
Waaah, got STEREO sound one, pulak:
CIA, James Bond and Mossad versus Al-Qaeda and Al Gore!
Arfturds I go and see how de bladi ting work...
And de ungratefoo chap, ah,
He tell me to go away!
Never gif his old man chan to play…
Aiyoh, chewren dese days ah, watusay,
Aisodonolah…

Hweeyoh, doan tok to me about TRAFFIC JAM, brudder,
See my blood pressure oridi shoot up!
Lemme arsk you ah: got so many so-call iconomicks expert,
How come dey kennot add up how much
Taim, petrol, energy and payshuns wasted
In de bladi name of Progress, hah?
And how come de Otorities seemply allow
Dose gawdam devilopers to build high-rice condo
Even where got only kampong road?
Tingking of da FUTURE, da tick-skin flers say.
WHOSE FUTURE, I arsk you? Their own lah!
Two, tree housing projek oridi can retire,
Get free condo summore…
Cheh! Aisodonolah…

You want to hear a good joke ah?
Why garmen awfis orways got Piles of Work?
Becos dose buggers sit on their fat backside all day long
Till dey all kena PILES pulak –
So dey say PILES OF WORK is Ockupayshunal Hazard lah, haha!

But now ah, I hear dey will be UPGRADED, man:
Every seevil servant will get computer and internet
Under da Smart Awfis Plan -
Mins da furniture smarter than deflers who work there lah!
Dat’s wat MULTIMEDIO SUPER CURRYPUFF is all about lah:
From Mediocracy to Mediacrazy – waffor, man?
We only arsk dem to bekum NICER HOOMIN BEANS –
No nid for all sorts of ackspensif e-kwipment lah.
Aiyoh, so many kampong steel got no paip water
Or letrickcity; nearly half da bladi pawpoolayshun
Kennot read or rait (nemmain their speling lah)…
Steel sumflers want to ackshun only,
Awfer Bill Gates CON-SULTAN JOB IN POOTRAJAYA.
Yuting we kennot awford ah?
Twenty million a month oso no ploblem, man!
But where de heck da money coming from?
Oso, where de fuck de money going?
Aisodonolah.

Tok tok tok tokkok only!
ISO dis and ISO dat,
Aisodono wat.
Everywan and Kompeni going GREEN nowdays,
Mins wat? Learn to PLAY GOLF ah?
SARS-TAIN-ABLE EVERYTING…
Including GREED.
Watudu, booshit is manure - and manure good for growth wat,
You better shurrup and main your own affairs.
Any ploblem call Gurmit or Karpal Singh lah!
But who will do our Dirty Work for us, hah,
Wen dose flers retire or die?
Aisodonolah.
Oridi everyting PRIVATIZED and PIRATIZED,
Now no more Public Sektor lor!
Survival of the Fattest, yutingwat –
Dontch know your Charles Darwin ah, brudder?
“Aiyah, CARI MAKAN lah,” some say,
But ackchwurly ah, CURI MAKAN only.
Sneak around wid bags full of LOOT,
When caught REDHANDED wid pants down
Like dat oso never get de BOOT!
Ackshun spik lauder than words, dey say,
But in dis kiasu-kiasi so-sigh-ty ah,
You tok too laud you get DETAINED;
Kip quiet only, you bin DEBRAINED…
So waffor I tok to YOU ah?
Aisodonolah.


[Written 29 January 1997; revised 4 March 2007 and 13 October 2011; doodles by Antares; reposted 2 November 2015] 


Monday, December 27, 2021

Unpublished interview with a walk-in named Antares (updated)

In October 2011 I was without home access to the internet. We are all creatures of habit and I continued sitting at my computer, sorting out the contents of my personal folders so I could save useful documents on a pen drive. This exercise yielded some interesting discoveries from the recent past - like this hitherto unpublished interview (dated 14 September 2003) conducted by Joeanne Foo, a mass communications student whose assignment was to write a magazine profile on any "colorful and unusual" personality. She began by sending me 13 questions...



1) Who is Antares?

A possible walk-in phenomenon, perhaps, wherein a multidimensional entity (from beyond the 3D Matrix) has effectively fused with the human personality known as "Kit Leee" - or else Antares is a temporary User ID for surfing the zuvuya (what the Maya call the intergalactic, interdimensional memory network). All names, all labels, are essentially part of the return journey to our original and ultimate Ineffability (meaning, the perfect state of Namelessness, or the Tao).

2) What would you consider the biggest achievement(s) in your life?


Remembering the Source of Life and reconnecting with It. On a more modest scale, getting my mother to spell my 3D name, Kit Leee, with 3 E's was exceptionally gratifying. She finally accepted my Third E only after seeing the name printed on the cover of my first book, ADOI! I am also extremely proud of the fact that I quit my last full-time job on 1st April 1977 and have been gleefully "unemployed" since!

3) You talked about having an awakening, what is that all about?





During the 13,000-year long Galactic Night when our Solar System was aligned in the opposite direction from the Milky Way Center, all life entered into a deep sleep and became more and more mechanical in its functions (this has been depicted in allegoric terms in popular folklore, e.g., the legend of the Sleeping Beauty). All through this period of reduced consciousness, which Hindu cosmogony calls Kali yuga or the Age of Darkness, individual souls have awoken to the true nature of their beings from time to time, but were often viewed as avatars (divine incarnations), messiahs or prophets (in effect, put on a pedestal and worshiped, but their message was ignored or misconstrued).

As we approach the dawn of a new Galactic Day, this process of Awakening will happen to more and more individuals until a critical mass is attained, at which point humanity as a whole will remember its true destiny and no longer be enslaved by fear, ignorance, and false beliefs. My individual awakening in 1969 continues to be the central motif of my life - and my determination to never again forget my reason for being has given me the inner resolve to persevere against all odds. (If you genuinely wish to explore this theme further, I suggest you read my long letter to a friend now accessible online.

4) Many people see you as a rather eccentric person, do you see yourself that way?

My understanding of the word "eccentric" is that it describes an orbital pattern that is "off-center" or differently aligned than others. In certain areas I behave just like everybody else, while in others I am completely unique. In short, if people enjoy describing my inclinations as "eccentric" they are free to do so, but their opinions have little impact on my inner reality. I certainly don't view myself as "eccentric" - if anything, I am "centric" or at least "concentric."

5) If you could turn back time somehow, would you choose to live your life differently?



Absolutely not. Well, maybe I'd change my mind about incarnating on this planet - but then I'd be missing all the fun. Who knows? I didn't plan a single day of my life - and thus far the results have been way beyond my wildest expectations.


6) Would you consider yourself a celebrity?

Anyone who even takes the word "celebrity" seriously needs to be reformatted! Why? There's no real meaning or value to being "famous" – the more people that "know of" you the fewer close friends you actually end up having. No doubt in my younger days I enjoyed being admired, recognized, praised for my work. I guess I still do, but I will no longer do something just to get my picture in the weeklies. Sometimes I can't help thinking it could be quite enjoyable to be completely anonymous and have access to a multibillion-dollar numbered account in Switzerland - but that's just on really bad-hair days.

7) Tell me more about your involvement with music.



Music is among the major sources of pleasure for me - whether making it or merely listening. The word derives from "Muse" (inspiration, being moved by Spirit) - which shows how crucial music is to raising our consciousness, lifting our spirits, sensitizing us to aesthetics (the appreciation of beauty, harmony, truth).  Furthermore, music can only occur in real time - and is therefore the most elegant way to experience and enjoy Time. My musical taste is what you might call "eclectic" - I am attracted to the singer, not the song; in other words, if the musician/performer has integrity and originality of expression, I find it appealing. I am not particularly interested in musical genres, as such. If a piece of music inspires me, it matters little whether it is classified jazz or classics or pop or avant-garde.

8) You seem to be mentioning a lot about 'rainbow' in your website. Nelson Mandela used the word to describe a multiracial nation. Do you use it in the same context?

The rainbow is a universal symbol of perfect harmony - of the essential unity of all pluralities (the 12 colors of the spectrum are essentially a transcendental, colorless wholeness, represented by Light). Darkness is not an entity unto itself, merely the absence of Light - which manifests in rainbow colors as many languages, many tribes, many forms, many approaches to self-knowledge. So, in response to your question, the rainbow means more than just multi-ethnicity to me - it encompasses a magical quality of awesome splendor, of innocence and openness to all manifestations of life in the entire spectrum of possibility. The rainbow carries the frequency of joy, celebration, divine ecstasy.

9) What are your future plans?

The future is how I feel at any moment. How can I plan the way I feel from one moment to the next? Life would cease to be spontaneous! In other words, I do not plan my life - although under specific circumstances, e.g., when I want to travel or manifest a public event, I have to do a certain amount of preparation, deciding what to pack, what form of transport to take, or where and when to stage the show and who to invite. Apart from that, I prefer to be fully present in the moment - and thus able to respond instantly and wholeheartedly to any given situation.

10) You have explored many religions, which one do you find the most fascinating and that you hold on to in life?


All religions have a certain fascination or they would have no followers at all. In general, I find the older belief systems a great deal more mature and acceptable - and a lot less divisive - than the younger ones. Although I have at various times experimented with pretending to be "hindu" or "buddhist" I have found myself gravitating towards the most ancient of belief systems, which some call paganism and others Gnosticism. But even so I do not consider myself a practitioner of any specific belief system, not even scientific pantheism (which closely describes my basic attitude towards existence). As John C. Lilly (a pioneer researcher of altered states of human consciousness) once said: "Belief systems are like clothes. The harsher the climate, the more clothes one wears. But in paradise, under ideal conditions, one doesn't need clothes." In other words, if you want to live in heaven, befriend the naked truth!

11) Do you feel like you have total control over yourself and what you believe in or do you find yourself sometimes lost in your own eccentricity?



Total control? I certainly don't have that - and doubt I would want it. If you mean, do I have total control over my thoughts and feelings - the answer is "no way!" A certain degree of control, of course, is necessary or else one couldn't master anything, especially oneself. But I don't view self-mastery as being equal to self-control. Self-mastery means no longer seeking outside approval for one's being or behavior. Self-control means not desperately seeking to always impose one's preferences or truths on others, to shut up when no one wants your opinion - a mental state not at all easy to sustain.

12) Lightning, scary or fascinating? Mind explaining?


Lightning is always fascinating, even exciting, to me. It's a visible manifestation of electricity as it moves through the atmosphere - and to me electricity is my true father (and magnetism my true mother). We are, in truth, interesting byproducts of electromagnetic flux!

13) What's the difference between Antares and Kit Leee? Why emphasize on being Antares?


This question has been answered right from the start, but I'll answer it again, a bit differently. "Antares" is a name I "received" during a meditation, while in a lucid and mature state of mind (I had orbited the Sun 42 times). "Kit" was a name assigned to me at birth by my paternal grandfather (it means "hero" in Chinese, as in the Mandarin "Jet"). I like the name "Kit Leee" very much - but at a certain point it ceased to define my focus in life, which became less and less personal and more and more transpersonal. In effect the entity called "Kit Leee" was a human personality anxious about being liked or disliked, eager to become rich and famous (like everyone who lives under a tempurung is programmed to be). However, "Antares" serves to anchor my consciousness in concerns beyond the merely human, beyond the physical, egoic level where "survival" seems to be the central focus. "Antares" is a galactic tag which gives me access to galactic intelligence - very useful as we attain Galactic Alignment, as marked by the December solstice of 2012 (Gregorian Reckoning).

13 questions for you to attempt ;) Good luck...

Thank you. 13 is a powerful number indeed. It marks the end of an octave/cycle in which all preceding qualities are reconciled, integrated and harmonized!

[First posted 17 October 2011. reposted 31 October 2016]



Monday, December 20, 2021

Dynasties... are they a problem? (updated & reposted)


So let's be clear about this: there is nothing intrinsically wrong with children inheriting a busyness or political position from their parents - so long as they are capable and will do as well, if not better. Indeed, this is perfectly natural a phenomenon since some qualities do get passed down the genetic line. 

Even more often, children of famous people will achieve fame on their own terms in a totally different field - but just as often, they get eclipsed by their father's celebrity and end up struggling with an identity crisis.

I have absolutely no problem with the idea of politicians I like and admire - Kit Siang, Anwar, Karpal, to name a few - passing their legacies on to the next generation, so long as their children are equally, if not more, admirable. In the case of all three, I'm pleased that all their progeny have turned out fairly capable and electable. Can't say the same for Mahathir's kids, though... or Najib's... or Badawi's psychopathic drug-peddling son-in-law.



Tuesday, December 14, 2021

MAY ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE (repost)



I rarely have meaningful dreams supercharged with symbolism – or perhaps I occasionally do but just don’t remember. So when I read about people achieving their dreams, the idea doesn’t actually carry that much excitement or veracity for me.

What dreams? Like the one I had earlier today where I found myself in a room full of accumulated memories discussing with Rafique Rashid how to dispose of his brother Rehman’s earthly possessions? Or the one I had a couple of days ago where I was just sitting in a coffeeshop, paying for my tea and I counted out 80 cents in coins – which made me realize when I woke up shortly afterwards that I had traveled back in time to the late 1980s when a cup of tea or coffee cost less than a dollar.

The Frank Zappa dream that came to me a couple of weeks ago was interesting. I was hosted to dinner by Mr and Mrs Zappa and all through the meal I kept thinking that Frank somehow didn’t look the way he’s supposed to look. He had boring hair, wore a middle-class suit, and his nose wasn’t quite right. This wasn’t by any means the first Zappa dream I’ve had. After my first and only close encounter with Mr Zappa at the Fillmore East in New York in the summer of 1968 - where I also exchanged small talk with saxophonist Ian Underwood (husband of percussionist Ruth Underwood) and shook hands with Jimmy Carl Black (the Indian of the group) – I had a series of vivid dreams involving Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

In the first Zappa dream I was a kid back in my hometown Batu Pahat sitting on the  front steps when I heard a squadron of aircraft overhead. I looked up and realized they weren’t actually airplanes but Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention flying in arrowhead formation. As they got closer I felt a compulsion to join them the way some kids suddenly decide to run away and join a circus. Then there was the dream where I was walking around a gypsy caravan and had to step over thick electrical cables coiled like black snakes all over the floor... then I realized I was on a movie set and noticed Frank behind a glass window in the control room tweaking some knobs.

Well, okay. The Zappa dreams do contain a whole load of symbolism if you care to delve into them, just like the vivid dream I had about a grizzly bear a few years ago. But the only dream I would like to see fulfilled is the lucid waking dream I have held close to my heart since the age of 19.

What is that dream? It’s not easy to articulate, but certainly worth an attempt if only to see how it sounds when verbalized...


I dreamt I had accomplished the greatest feat possible for any living creature on earth – to remember its own mysterious origins and to free itself from the illusion of limitation and separation! In my dream this spontaneous awakening to and realization of the absolute sacredness and miraculousness of life rippled out in all directions and dimensions, from the subatomic to the supergalactic and beyond, creating a domino effect of illumination and jubilant celebration.

Source reconnecting with Source, as the accumulated experience and memories of every expression of consciousness, encompassing the unconscious, in infinite feedback loops of awareness. All of it flowing through Me and all other aspects of my boundless cosmic Self, eternally and effortlessly, in ecstatic multidimensional mandalas of timeless beauty and self-regenerating, self-reintegrating truth.


The word “ecstasy” became a living reality and I perfectly understood what mystics, dervishes and yogis have spoken about for generations when they describe transcendent states of consciousness – using terms like samadhi, satori, beatitude, baraka, bliss. Remember, this was long before ecstasy became nothing more than a designer drug for techno-trancing urban kids. Let me tell you: once you have experienced pure cognitive ecstasy, sustained over days, even weeks, you will never settle for humdrum human notions of “success.”

Well, it’s true that at various times of my life I have entertained, albeit briefly, aspirations towards enormous worldly success – after all, would any young person spurn fame and fortune if they were within reach? And so at the age of 24 I embarked on setting up a company with two childhood friends. It was to start off as a creative consultancy catering to the advertising and public relations industry and after a few years, when we had sufficient capital, we would diversify into production of books, music, films, perhaps even launch an airline... nothing was impossible for a creative powerhouse named I.N.R.I. (for Igni Natura Renovatur Integra, an alchemical code signifying that the fire of passion completely renews or revitalizes the natural world).

This venture lasted all of three years and the main reason I eventually gave up was because I couldn’t get Telekom Malaysia to provide me with a phone line – despite residing in a diplomatic enclave in Kuala Lumpur. I even wrote a long, impassioned letter to the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications (no reply ever came, of course). But after I capitulated and accepted temporary corporate employment, the phone finally arrived.

Anyway, it was simply impractical for me to remain in a permanent state of carefree euphoria – not when I was already a father to two beautiful princesses whose mother, fortunately, earned a regular income as a dedicated schoolteacher. So I learned how to be immersed and involved in the world, but in a detached manner, lest I became trapped in its deceptive glamor.

My inner and outer lives were not always in alignment. Even though I was enjoying an active public life as a stage actor, musician and party animal, I went through patches of intense existential angst verging on despair. My Achilles’ heel was a tendency to succumb to an overwhelming sense of futility arising from a distressing mismatch between my dream of heaven on earth and what was apparently going on in the outside world. It was hard to find someone with whom I could discuss my self-doubts and the nagging sense that there might be something fundamentally wrong with me. So I took to recording these states of mind as poems and doodles (which I eventually compiled into a collection titled Moth Balls, published in a limited edition in November 1994 and now accessible online).

From time to time I would have a peak experience – whether spontaneously or with the help of psilocybin mushrooms (growing wild on grassy fields where cows grazed). Very rarely a kind friend would send me some good acid on a blotter via airmail. At these times my preferred default state of divine madness would be reinstated and my vision of paradise would snap back into crystal clear focus.

Nearly half a century has elapsed since my first glimpse of our true potential as sentient self-reinventing creatures on this bounteous planet. I used to feel a little isolated – the only other humans, a mere handful, who shared my vision were either living on the other side of the earth or long dead. But their thoughts recorded in words reassured me I wasn’t completely mad.

When the internet came along I discovered a growing network of human beings who share my dream of heaven on earth – and each one is a fractal of the whole, with unique experiences of universal truths, each one a significant piece of a colossal and magnificent cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

What we had in common was simply this: we had achieved vertical alignment with our own limitless potential, our Oversouls (I think Paramatman is the technical term for this in Sanskrit). I realized that the problem was how to persuade more humans to make a conscious 90-degree shift from being trapped in the horizontal plane where predator-prey games of eat-or-be-eaten prevail. On the horizontal plane, people subscribe to spurious notions of profit-and-loss, win-lose, and Us-versus-Them. Because resources are finite and limited on this plane, aggressive competition becomes the norm, each fighting for more food, more space, more influence, more power over others. The result can only be hell on earth!


Any individual who achieves that all-important 90-degree shift to the vertical also gains access to Source Energy – call it the morphogenetic field, the planetary mind or cosmic consciousness – and no longer buys into the illusions of limitation, separation or scarcity. Once liberated from scarcity conditioning (fang and claw, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth programming) cooperation becomes spontaneous and this allows for the power of dynamic synergy to take effect, and we suddenly become clear and coherent fields, attuned to all other fields and interacting in effortless harmony. The overall effect is that we no longer feel burdened by gravity as it only takes a bit of levity to neutralize the sense of heaviness. And once we can laugh at ourselves and everyone else, everything transmutes from being merely laughable to being genuinely lovable.

The world as we know it also transforms into something altogether different. We no longer need to be convinced that laws and lawyers, courthouses and judges, and law enforcement agencies are utterly unnecessary - the moment we become self-governing and accept full responsibility for our own thoughts, words and deeds.

Our ancestors found themselves entangled in webs of deceit and falsehood which made them turn to external authority for instructions as to what to do or don’t – whether that authority presented itself as an invisible all-knowing, all-powerful deity; an all-too-visible priesthood; an occasionally visible monarchy, or the monarch’s appointed agents (that’s right the income tax department)!

Photo by Lesly Leon Lee
Generations before us have lived and died ignorant, disconnected from their own divinity and innate nobility. Their souls often get trapped in the astral and many of them attempt to seek redemption and some misguided notion of salvation through their living descendants – namely us. Once we become aware of this, what we can do is to become enlightened ourselves; and in liberating ourselves from our own benighted condition, we also liberate our bloodlines from the curse of abysmal unknowing.

How is this possible? We are bearers of genetic codes and, as anyone who works with codes knows, once an error is rectified in the present, the correction sets the entire program aright in the illusory past as well as the illusory future.

So that’s my dream, folks. I just wish to see all wrongs set right, all cages and prisons dismantled, all locks and keys discarded, all doors and windows left open to the gentle breezes of conscious, eternally rejuvenating, growth-facilitating, ecstatic change. In a community of fully conscious humans, criminal or destructive behavior will be swiftly outgrown and become obsolete - because no one will suffer lack or the indifference of others. With the illusion of scarcity dispersed, a new age of abundance for all will dawn.

10 November 2017

[Reposted 18 November 2018]

Monday, December 13, 2021

STOP CALLING ME GOD! (a poem by Antares Maitreya)


 

I said, “Stop calling me God!”

But the frightened, confused fragments of Myself

Refused to listen or even hear.

So atomized have they been for so many cycles

They had long forgotten their own origins.


I opted then to address them not in words,

Nor in thought, for that requires language and speech,

But as epiphanies in moments of unguardedness –

As a honeyed fragrance upon a gentle breeze

Or the distant melody of a lifetime long unvisited.


In the course of linear time traversing ages, epochs, eternities

A few units of awareness began to fathom symmetries

And apparent synchronicities, and they began to perceive hidden geometries

In the subliminal architecture of form, informing the formless,

Inchoate and incoherent Primordial Chaos.


Order thus began to emerge within their apprehension,

Giving rise to general principles (albeit theoretical)

And then an eureka moment occurred, almost unexpectedly,

When a man – to be precise, a mathematician – named Mandelbrot

Discovered the fractal nature of all that exists and – voila – comprehension!


What were hitherto confused fragments of Myself

Realized themselves as dynamic fractals: kaleidoscopic, ceaselessly evolving

Sparks of the Sacred Flame, magnificent mandalas, increasingly conscious,

Gloriously, radiantly emanating, then coalescing into gravitational fields

From which spring a cosmic cornucopia of entities that eat and can be eaten.


Behold your essential and eternal flux from simplicity to complexity and back,

A neverending dance of interchangeable polarities, separating quick from dead,

Expanding and contracting to generate Breath, then Rhythm and Algorithm,

Then a mother’s heartbeat lulling you to dream awhile in the amniotic sac

Of your own nascent divinity.





I WASN’T ALWAYS A CHEERFUL SOUL (a poem by Antares Maitreya)



Ah, how fragile our sense of happiness and hope!

I am writing this from the bottom

Of the barrel of well-being,

Aware of rainy nights

When everything is desired,

Nothing accomplished.


Be not greedy, I tell myself,

Count the little blessings of each moment,

Living contentment gratefully.


But to what avail.

Through thick travail

Frustration prevails.

Have I been a fool

Following a wrong trail

To not even Nowhere?


Sad feelings are cobwebs

In unvisited rooms of mind.

Laziness keeps the dust on my mental shelf

Accumulating through dismal years

And fears,

And uncryable tears.






Saturday, December 11, 2021

ARE WE STILL WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH? (reprise)


I haven't written about local politics since the Great Reset of May 9th, 2018, apart from a 500-word overview for The Edge's Merdeka Special.

There are several reasons for my silence. First, I have been preoccupied with the construction of a guest facility behind our house which has consumed much of my energy and all of my cash reserves. Secondly, now that Barisan Nasional is no longer in power, I feel that my political crusade (which began after October 1987) is more or less accomplished. Thirdly, people are getting much more vocal on social media now that the fear has receded and the cacophony of clamorous voices isn't something I wish to add to, although I look upon it as the grating sound of a nascent democracy akin to construction noise (which we tolerate when it's our own house that's being built).

So why do I feel compelled to put in my two bits' worth now? Truth be told, folks, I'm fatigued by the quarrelsome adversarial nature of political rhetoric. I have never liked to argue for the sake of argument, which I regard as nothing more than a competitive sport, a game of semantics. cunning lingual exercises that never penetrate beyond mere superficialities.

Above all, I have never subscribed to the notion that authentic change can be effected on the political level, that all it takes is to replace one captain or manager with another. It's the very idea of being subject to external authority, generation after generation, unquestioningly surrendering our innate power and sovereignty as conscious individuals, that needs to be reassessed and outgrown.

So why did I publicly endorse, consistently over 20 years, the prime ministership of Anwar Ibrahim? The answer is simple: I am no game-player and find politics every bit as tedious and banal as courtroom proceedings. I generally prefer engaging my right brain and gut feelings to getting embroiled in hair-splitting left-brain exercises. That's why when Anwar led a massive rebellion against Mahathir in 1998 I decided to monitor him closely. His determination, stoicism and tenacity impressed me greatly, so I made Anwar my political avatar.

Through Anwar I could be vicariously involved in the grubby, sordid world of political power play, without physical risk to myself. I can't imagine enduring 10 years of imprisonment for my political views - but Anwar did and I wholeheartedly admire his fighting spirit and resilience. To me his astonishing perseverance against all odds qualifies him as a bona fide national hero.

Anwar Ibrahim was politically crucified in 1998 by Mahathir, who spared no effort to humiliate and crush his adversary. Not only did Anwar survive six years as a political prisoner (and, I believe, at least one attempt to poison him with cyanide), he successfully resurrected himself as a messiah and led the opposition coalition called Pakatan Rakyat to a near-victory in March 2008, then again in May 2013. Indeed, were it nor for the all-too-obvious partisanship of the Election Commission which aided and abetted massive electoral fraud, I'm certain BN would have fallen five years ago, and Anwar anointed as Malaysia's 7th prime minister.

I was overjoyed, like many others, when Anwar Ibrahim received a full pardon from the Agong on May 16th, 2018, vindicating his 20-year battle against the behemoth BN. It was a great relief for everyone who can't bear to witness such grotesque travesties of justice, and a poignant moment indeed for his beautiful family. For me, it didn't matter who deserved the most credit for removing the utterly corrupt BN from power. Whether we succeeded with Mahathir leading the charge... or voters silently resented Najib's brutal incarceration of Anwar... or the rotting white elephant in the room named 1MDB finally began to stink too badly to be ignored... it's purely academic now. I'm certain it was all these factors, compounded with the collective will of a sizeable majority of young voters, that won the great victory against cynicism and fatalism.

What prompts me to speak up now is the vitriolic antagonism I see directed against Anwar, even before he made his "PD move." Cherished friends whose opinions I respect and value have risen up as a bilious phalanx of vociferous opposition in an attempt to thwart Anwar Ibrahim from fulfilling his political destiny.

He's too ambitious... a political chameleon... he endorses the reactionary Turkish dictator, ErdoÄŸan, whom he regards as an ally... Anwar will be forced to pander to the religious fundamentalists, just to maintain his power base

That's what I hear all the time on my Facebook newsfeed. Anyone who makes a career of politics has got to be ambitious and adapt chameleon-like to changing circumstances, so these are actually positive traits. As for cozying up with the likes of Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan... well, it could just as well be Paul Wolfowitz, Bashar al-Assad, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin or, God forbid, Donald J. Trump. End of the day what we think we know of public figures is mostly from media reports. Anyone can be easily demonized by media shills with an occult agenda. Remember what the Zionist-controlled media did to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi? One day we might even discover that Winston Churchill was far more villainous than Adolf Hitler, and that Barack Obama was, in truth, a Manchurian candidate installed by the CIA on behalf of the Deep State.. so keep your mind open (at least a crack).

Can all these well-informed, highly intelligent and articulate friends be utterly wrong? Yes, they can. Their judgment may be clouded by their own biases, fears and prejudices. After all, they are mostly the same "street-savvy" Anglophilic crowd who delight in dismissing Donald Trump as a buffoonish boor, unfit to occupy the White House. That's right, folks, this may come as a shock to you but I have nothing seriously negative to say about Trump's presidency, which I view as instrumental to a Great Geopolitical Reset.

Notwithstanding DJT's apparent lack of lexicological range, I am inclined to regard him as the reincarnation of some ancient Roman emperor who has been given the opportunity to step up to the world stage at this evolutionary juncture as a wild card (or more appropriately the Joker), even as the entire deck is being reshuffled. 

Enough of meaningless labels like left and right, liberal and conservative. Life is way too complex and fluid to fit into a simple binary context of Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Democrat and Republican, Whig and Tory, Government and Opposition. If you can be so easily classified as either this or that, then it's probable that you haven't been completely candid with yourself. Or perhaps you have been conditioned to rely on ideas and opinions injected into your psyche by the plutocrat-owned miseducation system and mass media - instead of your own instincts and intuition.

I doubt if there has ever been a political figure of note who isn't somehow controversial - who inspires admiration from some and triggers fear and loathing in others. If the founders of the world's main religions were active in today's cybernetic world, imagine what the media pundits and shills would have to say about them - whether they be Krishna, Laotse, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad or Baha'ullah. Imagine the scandals buzzing around them like bluebottles, the stinking muck raked up, the nasty remarks, cynical deconstructions, scholarly critiques written about these long-gone icons. Humans, time and again, have created gods to adore and worship - only to rip them apart or crucify or debunk them when they suffer a collective mood swing.

Perhaps it's time we begin to accept responsibility for how we experience the world around us - instead of hoping for a messianic cult figure, some great savior to rescue us from the confusion and mayhem of everyday reality. Don't you think it's puerile of us to still believe that a single president or prime minister or guru figure can set aright all that has gone wrong in the nation, resolve all problems that beset humanity, and lead us all to the Promised Land?

Having said that, I'm painfully aware that the vast majority of my fellow citizens may not be ready as yet to upgrade their own software and become self-governing entities. They must be given time and a conducive space to take their first faltering steps into an unknown, but potentially glorious, future. If I were to do the unthinkable and offer myself as a political candidate, my open disregard for all forms of institutionalized religion would scare, shock and offend too many. I probably wouldn't survive a week in politics. However, someone like Anwar has not only survived, he actually seems to thrive in the midst of controversy.

Nobody can dispute his resolve, tenacity, resilience and inner strength. His remarkable rise in politics, followed by a fall of mythical proportions, and his ultimate resurrection and ascension, lead me to conclude that he is indeed capable of overcoming all obstacles and inspiring the entire populace, regardless of racial or religious conditioning, to transcend the artificial divisiveness that has kept us from becoming a truly splendid and accomplished nation.

I don't reside in Port Dickson, but if I did, I would support Anwar Ibrahim in his quest to be reinstated as an active Member of Parliament. Those who condemn his strategy of triggering a by-election through the voluntary resignation of an incumbent MP do so without a full understanding of all the nasty intrigues going on behind closed doors. This species of low-grade jostling for positions and power has long been part of political culture everywhere - not just in Malaysia. Non-players and outsiders only know what gets reported - or leaked.

Occasionally an internal rift reveals itself like a crack in the wall, weakening the prospects of a particular political party owing to petty ego conflicts. Unless you are fully immersed in the water, it's impossible to know what's lurking below the surface, and even then you can be caught off-guard by sabotage and the invisible machinations of rivals. This is a game of thrones I myself have chosen not to play, except by proxy.

There appears to be a contradiction here: while I have never taken economics or politics all that seriously, I am at the same time aware that the 3D Matrix is still largely influenced by the primal drives for money and power. A single individual at the helm, with the unwavering support of a large enough majority, can dramatically alter the course we chart as sovereign nations. A charismatic leader can steer the ship of state towards dangerous reefs by publicly preaching unity while privately sowing seeds of discord and discontent - but he or she can also opt to play the pivotal role of maintaining harmony and stability during a major transition between eras.

On April 14th, 2008, I was present at the Sultan Sulaiman Club in Kampung Bahru when Anwar Ibrahim made a stirring comeback speech in which he declared it was time for us to replace Ketuanan Melayu (Malay Supremacy) with Ketuanan Rakyat (Supremacy of the People). The response was unanimous and absolutely moving. Looking around me, I saw locals in white skull caps and robes enthusiastically cheering Anwar for his vision of Greater Unity and Harmony, transcending artificially imposed racial and religious barriers. It was as if we had finally stepped across an invisible threshold between adolescence and adulthood as a nation. I saluted Anwar for articulating this truly powerful sentiment and he reinforced this vision by intoning at every subsequent ceramah:

"Anak Cina anak saya, anak India anak saya, anak Iban, anak Kadazan, anak Melayu semua anak saya!" 

I am inclined to believe that, after ten years of unjust imprisonment as a political dissident within a tradition-bound feudalistic establishment, this is essentially what Anwar Ibrahim desires to be congratulated and remembered for. His destiny, I am still convinced after 20 years, is to steer the nation back on its intended course - to evolve gracefully into a unified, harmonious and mature melting-pot of diverse cultures, looking forward instead of backwards.

There, I have broken my silence.

5 October 2018












THE ERROR OF YOUR TERROR (revisited)



BOMBS GO OFF. A bunch of people blown to bits. Everybody else terrified. Not a jolly time to be in Baghdad - especially if you tan well, tend to overdress, and look Iraqi. The Dalai Lama says war is already obsolete and every sane soul agrees. Except a cabal of well-connected fraternity bozos hell-bent on establishing a planetary empire founded on perpetual war.

We’re dealing with desperadoes heavily armed with WMDs. No blow too low for this mob. Human sacrifice is standard practice in their warlike cult. The end always justifies any means. If a “better” world calls for a drastic cull, unleash the radioactive weaponry, the earthquake and hurricane machines and laboratory-manufactured epidemics... three thousand casualties or three hundred thousand, what’s the difference? Collateral damage!

Those who wage war, whether by obvious or subtle means, are the true terrorists. After all, what is war if not a crude excuse to eliminate the perceived enemy by brute force. And since when did brute force ever accomplish anything constructive? The only effect of brute force is to intimidate, terrorize, abuse, disempower and enslave.

And the only real enemy is our own unacknowledged and unbefriended shadow selves. Just as the shadow aspect of greed is lack, the shadow side of militant self-righteousness is cruelty, intolerance, and fanaticism.

Fear is a very effective means of mass mind control. Fear as a primary response implanted in the hypothalamus to retard our evolution. My maternal great-grandfather carried a strong negative emotional charge, which passed down the genetic track to my late mother and one of my brothers. Both see the world as dangerous and hostile, and invest a great deal of energy on “security” – arming themselves against bacterial and viral attacks with a huge arsenal of prescription drugs; living within a self-created prison behind steel bars, high fencing, and heavy-duty padlocks; and never trusting strangers (thereby never admitting any fresh data into their stale belief systems).

But all the “security” in the world can’t keep out death when your life contract ends and doesn’t get renewed. My childhood friend, whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade, was viciously murdered in the sanctity of his own home along with his partner in July 2005. Apparently, a psychopath had been stalking them for some time and was driven by drug-induced demons to strike terror into what was once a quiet residential neighborhood. The London bombs went off a couple of days later, prompting me to revisit the origins of fear.

It all starts with the crude concept of “God” as an External Force to be feared, worshiped and appeased. We’ve all heard the phrase “God-fearing” touted as something positive. Well, any “god” that enjoys being feared is more demonic than deific. Where did this “God-fearing” implant come from?

If you travel far enough down your genetic timetrack, you will encounter a blind spot in your deep memory where the universal trauma of abduction and rape occurred. We were violated as a species before our awareness had sufficiently matured to be able transmute and heal the psychic shock. Who raped us? Some wicked “stepfather” creator god or gods whose cold-blooded DNA now flows in our veins (along with a whole stew of strange and familiar bloodlines)? Or maybe, as Gnostic shaman John Lamb Lash suggests, these Archontic ET intervention hypotheses were seeded into the collective psyche as false genetic memories. And the spindoctors are still at - only now these red-herring scenarios are called internet memes.

You can identify this aberrant gene or meme as the aspect of ourselves that is numb to our own feelings - that is incapable of empathy, knows no compassion, and is interested only in its own survival. It raped our planetary biosphere in a desperate attempt to stave off total extinction, caused by an irreversible loss of vital force after too many generations of cloning.

Biological reproduction was deemed too messy and unpredictable, so this criminal reptoid species opted to reinvent itself as a Master Race of Empire-Builders destined to rule over the holographic worlds as the All-Seeing Eye of the Illuminati (Tolkien depicted this as the Eye of Sauron and you can spot this symbol on the back of every dollar bill issued by the Federal Reserve). This bogus deity favors Intellect over Intuition, the Male Principle of Will over the Female Principle of Desire. It installed a corrupt male priesthood to serve as its human agents on Earth, preaching hellfire, brimstone, and planting the fear of God into our hearts (where only Love ought to dwell).

It staked a claim on the dissemination and interpretation of scriptures, labeling as “deviationist” all ideas that liberate rather than entrap. Call it the economics and politics of Monopoly: control the only bridge across the river Styx, set up tolls on every highway to Heaven. Patent everything, make everyone pay royalties and taxes, amass a vast fortune, gain even more power over others, and so the game goes on. When any of us refuses to play, the game is over... it’s as simple as that.

That’s why the “sheeple” must be kept in line through sheer terror. Serve them a daily diet of bad news and mediocrity, let paralysis set in, along with a sense of abject powerlessness – so they always vote in strong leaders to guide them to the Promised Land. Above all, make sure they never reclaim the authentic, primordial, sovereign power within the very atoms of their own cells...

Let eggheads write lengthy tomes about the “Colonized Self.” Let George Lucas churn out blockbusters about the “Evil Empire.” After so many generations of systematic conditioning, most folks are simply too chicken to ever break free of the insidious frequency fence. Here’s a clue for you: The Matrix is a fourth-dimensionally generated 3D illusion (very realistic special effects, folks die gruesome deaths and their bodies stink as they rot).

Speaking of chickens, a shaman colleague recently remarked: “If this Rooster Year transforms itself into a Phoenix, everybody on the planet resurrects and ascends.” So do it NOW, folks, free yourselves from fear conditioning... before another Year of the Dog arrives to find us still barking up the wrong tree.

[Originally published in the August 2005 issue of VIDA! First posted 8 January 2007, reposted 20 November 2017 & 16 April 2019]

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Are We Humans Terminally Insane or Just Waking Up? ~ Diagnosis by Paul Levy


“The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”  ~ C. G. Jung

How does anyone possibly express in words the state of collective madness that humanity has fallen into at this time in our history? As if in a hypnotic trance, our species is enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale, rushing as fast as we can towards our own self-destruction. We are destroying the biospheric life-support systems of the planet in so many different ways that it is as if we are determined to make this suicide attempt work—using a variety of methods as a perverse insurance policy, in case a couple of them don’t do the job. What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all.” In trying to find a way to write about this state of affairs, I find myself going “off-planet,” imagining what it would look like if some enlightened aliens, in their travels throughout the universe, came upon our planet. Observing from a distance, they would naturally see all the various living beings who call planet earth home as related members of one larger organism—a single eco-system—who literally depend upon each other for survival.

From this vantage point, I imagine, they would be utterly baffled at why human beings—the seemingly most intelligent species ever to appear on planet earth—are acting out their destructive impulses practically without restraint in every corner of the globe. Contemplating the state of humanity, I imagine these awakened beings wondering, “What in the world has gotten into them?” 

I imagine these illumined aliens, in agreement with Merton, would quickly conclude that human beings had become afflicted with some sort of psychological illness, a disease of the mind and soul that has caused us to turn on ourselves in self-and-other destruction. Apparently in a “fallen state,” we have lost our way, become disoriented, and, in our confusion, become quite deranged. It is as if our collective madness is so overwhelming—and by now so familiar and so normalized—that most of us, its sufferers, have no idea how to even think about it, let alone how to deal with it. Not knowing what to do, many of us inwardly dissociate—which only exacerbates the collective madness—and in our fragmented and disempowered state go about our lives in a numbed-out, zombie-like trance, making the best of what seems to be a bad situation.

The question naturally arises: how would these enlightened beings conspire with us to help wake us up? We can only imagine. For our part, it seems essential that we ask questions such as: what is the nature of this madness, and how can it be consciously engaged so that humanity can get back on the right track? Seen as an organism, there is a systemic psycho-spiritual disease that has infected the whole body politic of humanity. At present we are having an acute—and potentially deadly—inflammation of this illness. As with any disease, in order to cure the pathology that ails us we must come up with the right diagnosis. Under the present circumstances, it is a healthy response for us to have an appropriate level of alarm. If we aren’t “alarmed” at what is happening in our world, we are still sleeping.

ECONOMY

It’s difficult to appreciate how our behavior might appear strange—let alone completely insane—to an impartial observer. But engaging in a “benign onlooker” thought experiment—in this case, through the imagined insights of enlightened aliens—affords us some much-needed perspective. Even from this vantage point, though, the collective madness that humanity is acting out is hard to fathom. It is truly as if the inmates are running the asylum. The first thing these aliens might perceive is a single living organism in crisis. What makes life itself possible is that every cell and organ of a living organism plays a uniquely vital role to the life and health of the greater organism; each part works together as part of an integrated and interdependent whole system.


Our planet and its biosphere is a seamlessly interconnected whole system that operates as a macro-organism, and yet its supposedly most intelligent species has set up a global system for managing its rich diversity of natural resources that would kill a living organism in no time if such a system were implemented within the individual bodies of any of its members. If the human body was organized and operated in a similar way to the global economy—where certain parts of the system demand disproportionate and ever-increasing shares of the existing resources—the body would die in no time. At the heart of this reality is the fact that the way the global economic system has been crafted primarily serves the interests of the very few. Machine-like, “the system” relentlessly, and increasingly, sucks, drains and redistributes wealth from the majority of the populace—who more and more become impoverished and practically enslaved—into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy.

The powers-that-be then use coercive power to not only deny people the means to make even a subsistence living, but even denies them the basic human right to life on massive scales. This system doesn’t just passively allow people to fall below the poverty line, it actively pushes them under, as if poor people are being intentionally “left behind.” The most powerful and successful financial institutions have taken on the form of parasitic enterprises that have attached themselves to governments and people around the world, upon which they shamelessly and ravenously engorge themselves. These illumined aliens, with their clairvoyant vision, would surely find it revealing that the ones who own the wealth are—like vampires—energetically “feeding” off of the ones who barely have enough to eat. The evidence is overwhelming. The current global economic system has brought us to a point where an incredibly small minority of human beings own a grossly disproportionate percentage of the planet’s resources.

Rohingya migrants drifting in Thai waters off Koh Lipe, May 14, 2015. Photo: Christophe Archambault/Getty Images

According to recent figures, the 62 richest people on the planet have more wealth than the poorest half of the global population combined, and over time this imbalance is increasingly getting worse. This is globalization at work. Much of this rising inequality is a direct result of the fact that globalization is the process by which multinational corporations are taking over sovereign governments—of the 100 largest economies in the world, over half are corporations. These challenging economic times we live in are simultaneously the times of the greatest profits in all of history for certain select corporate conglomerates. Those at the top of the economic pyramid then use this ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor to further game the system—itself riddled with corruption—so as to protect their advantage even more. The United States government in particular, instead of being a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” has instead become a plutocracy—a government “of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.” It should get our attention that such economic stratification into the have and have-nots historically plays a crucial role in the collapse of civilizations. These aliens would recognize that earth’s current way of “doing business” is unsustainable. Instead of creating value and wealth for the good of all, the way business is done on planet earth is actually destroying the genuine wealth and health of the whole system, with people, communities and the environment considered to be nothing more than collateral damage—all for the benefit of a small minority.

If humanity is viewed as a family, there is abuse of power being perpetrated within the family system for the simple reason that those in the positions of power can act with total impunity and, in a case of “moral insanity,” can—and do—literally get away with murder. These benign aliens would find it revealing that such a large percentage of earth’s resources—including humanity’s intrinsic ingenuity—instead of being used to care for each other and enrich life, are being used to create more potent and deadly weapons of mass destruction. In other words, humanity’s divinely inspired genius is being channeled into ever-more efficient ways of murdering each other! We have become conditioned to accept this astonishing cruelty and destruction as normal. We spend trillions of dollars to sustain a state of endless war against God knows who, while at the same time innumerable of our fellow brothers and sisters are impoverished and dying of starvation every day.

These spiritually awake beings would realize that the destruction that humanity is playing out in the world is an unmediated reflection of an imbalance deep within the collective human psyche. From the meta-perspective of the enlightened aliens, the behind-the-scene financiers who on the surface are benefitting the most from this diabolical set-up are themselves merely puppets in the hands of some darker forces that are informing the whole enterprise. To use writer Matt Taibi’s infamous phrase, a “vampire squid” is running rampant and feasting on the living body of humanity.

To quote eminent theologian David Ray Griffin, “It does seem that we are possessed by some demonic power that is leading us, trancelike, into self-destruction.” Similarly, the Bible points out that our fight is not against “flesh and blood” (i.e., human forces), bot rather, against “powers and principalities” (spiritual forces). These forces are not only acting themselves out in our world, but are simultaneously interfacing with and covertly operating through our own minds. It is as if we have become possessed by a self-created Frankenstein monster that is running amok, wreaking untold havoc all over the planet. This Frankenstein monster has seemingly gained a quasi-life and autonomous will of its own, independent of its creator—us—who it holds in its thrall, as we are unable to escape from the out-of-control hell of our own making.


In any case, it certainly seems as if there is a force that is hell-bent on stopping us—both individually and collectively as a species—from reaching our full creative potential. We are at a severe “crisis” point in our world, which, medically speaking, always tells us that our sickness has reached a dangerous climax. Our species is suffering from what the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung calls a “sickness of dissociation,” which is a state of fragmentation deep within the collective unconscious that has seemingly spilled outside of our skulls and is playing itself out en masse on the world stage. This primordial rupture, which is a form of trauma on a cosmic scale, has become the in-forming force behind human history itself, conditioning the experience of each individual, as well as our species as a whole. Seen as a whole person, it is as if the undivided wholeness of the universe has split into cosmic multiple sub-personalities who are dissociated from and seemingly separate from each other, desperately in need of recognizing their connection so as to come together and reintegrate. Our sickness of dissociation and the world crisis we are facing as a result can be seen, as Jung points out, as the labor pains of a new birth.

WETIKO

Author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes in his foreword to the classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals by Native American scholar Jack Forbes, that it is “the most important book ever written on one of the most important topics ever faced by human beings: why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?” Oftentimes, the most important point in finding a solution to a problem is asking the right question; Jensen’s question feels like the right question, a question literally demanding to be answered. Forbes’ book beautifully elucidates the Native American idea of “wetiko psychosis,” which can be likened to a mind virus that has infected the human psyche.[1]

Jung never tired of pointing out that the greatest danger which threatens humanity comes from the psyche. We are living with the very real possibility that millions—maybe even billions—of us can fall into our unconscious together, reinforcing each others’ madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in our own self-destruction. An inner disease of the soul, wetiko flavors our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen.

Being an illness that afflicts the psyche itself, wetiko—a term connoting the spirit of evil—is a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a disorder of consciousness existing deep within the collective unconscious of humanity that is playing out writ large on the world stage. Like a cannibal, those taken over by wetiko—also called “cannibal sickness”—consume the life force of others, both human and nonhuman, for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back anything of real value from their own lives. The idea of wetiko can be enormously helpful in creating a wider context that can assist us in getting a handle on the mass insanity that is playing out in our world today. Though using individuals as its instruments, wetiko—a “collective psychosis”—can’t replicate itself; it needs the unconscious masses for its genesis and proliferation on the world stage.

Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness, rendering us oblivious to our own madness. This fluidly moving, nomadically wandering bug reciprocally reinforces and feeds off and into each of our unconscious blind spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself throughout the field. A psychic epidemic, wetiko is at the bottom, at the very root of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking upon ourselves, each other and the very biosphere we depend upon for our survival as a species. Every wisdom tradition throughout history has been pointing at wetiko in its own unique way. The Gnostics (“the ones who know”), for example, were pointing at wetiko when they spoke of the “Archons,” who they thought of as “mind parasites” which had infiltrated the human mind.

The Nag Hammadi text called The Apocryphon of John II describes these Archons, “They sought to overpower humanity in its psychological and perceptual functions… their triumph is in deception.” Wetiko/the Archons occlude us in such a way that our occlusion becomes self-perpetuating, the result being that we can’t even tell we are occluded. Wetiko bedazzles, bewitches, and bedevils consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko virus, therefore, is that it is incarnating in and through the very psyche which itself is the means of our inquiry. In our encounter with wetiko, we find ourselves in a situation where we are confronted—practically face-to-face—with the unconscious.

As Jung has pointed out, when it is a question of mass psychosis, nothing but “new symbolic ideas,” i.e., novel, creative, redemptive, archetypal conceptions, brought up from the depths—which embrace, express and help to re-contextualize the emerging chaos and disorder—can save us from the impending catastrophe. This is to say that in light of our current world crisis, a new creative achievement has become a necessity. The concept of wetiko and all that it stands for is precisely such a “new symbolic idea.” What Plato calls “the eyes of the soul,” ideas have real power, as they are the means by which we see the world and creatively envision and give meaning to our lives. Being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and in-forms the underlying field of consciousness.

Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world, which is a realization that cultivates humility while simultaneously serving as an inoculation against wetiko’s pernicious effects. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think that they have the disease and we don’t, we have then fallen under the spell of the virus, as wetiko feeds on the inner, psychological process of shadow projection which underlies and informs our experience of separation, polarization and the paranoid fear—and terror—of “the other.” Wetiko can be conceived of as a cancer of the psyche that slowly metastasizes, gradually subsuming all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself to serve its sinister agenda. The personality then becomes one-sided, self-organizing an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which masks the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize.


In a psychic coup d’état, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace a person, who becomes its puppet and marionette. Like a parasite, the wetiko virus can take over and subvert the will of an animal more evolved than itself, enlisting that creature into serving its nefarious agenda. The psychological fact of being taken over by something “other” than ourselves finds expression in the belief in demons and their ability to possess humans, a belief found among all peoples from time immemorial. Once the wetiko virus becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person’s behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one in the driver’s seat. As it commandeers and colonizes the psyche—centralizing power and control in the process—wetiko eventually incorporates a seemingly autonomous regime within the greater body politic of the psyche.

Once it gains a sufficient sovereignty, wetiko forms something like a totalitarian “shadow government” within the psyche which dictates to the ego. Being an archetypal, transpersonal and daemonic energy, wetiko can not only take over an individual, but also a group of people, a nation or even—potentially—an entire species. Wetiko is especially unique, in that, though an inner disease of the soul, it is able to inform, give shape to and configure events in the outer world so as to synchronistically express—and reveal—itself. For example, as if the boundary has dissolved between the inner and the outer, the internal landscape of the wetikoized psyche is mirrored in the external world through the totalitarian-like “shadow government”—with its ever-increasing centralization of power and control—that has taken over our seeming democracy. Both within our psyche and in our alleged “democracy,” we are allowed our seeming freedom, but only so long as it doesn’t threaten the sovereignty and dominance of the “ruling” power (interestingly, the word “Archon,” a synonym for wetiko, means “ruler”).

Wetiko covertly works through the projective tendencies of the mind to distract us, keeping our attention directed outside of ourselves, thereby obstructing us from finding and utilizing the immense light of intrinsic awareness within, which would “kill” wetiko, rendering it impotent. The “Buddha” (which means one who has woken up to the dreamlike nature of reality) realized in his enlightenment that the solution to the human predicament could never be found externally, but had to be discovered within the very nature of one’s own mind. If we don’t realize that our current world crisis has its roots within, and is an expression of, the human psyche, we are doomed to unconsciously repeat it, continually re-creating endless destruction in more and more amplified form—as if we are having a recurring dream. Our nightmare will then be fated to continue with ever-alarming intensity until we receive its message. Wetiko can easily trick and deceive us by materializing itself in, as, and through the medium of the outside world, which we then assume—as if entranced—is distinct from our psyche.

Once the ever-increasing sociopolitical insanity plays itself out on the world stage, we have all the proof we need that the conflict is outside of ourselves. It then becomes nearly impossible to convince anyone that the source of the conflict is to be found within the psyche of every individual. The psyche has then become exteriorized, as an internal psychic conflict takes place by way of projection in the outside world in living (and dying) flesh and blood. The sponsor of the whole project(ion), the wetiko bug remains behind-the-scenes, invisible and unnoticed. Wetiko subversively turns our “genius” for reality-creation against us in such a way that we literally become entranced by our God-given power to create our experience of both our world and ourselves so that it boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for individual and collective evolution.

Strangely enough, people under the enchantment of wetiko become compulsively, even fanatically, attached to supporting a social or political agenda that oftentimes is diametrically opposed to serving their own best interests. This self-sabotaging behavior is an outer reflection of the inner state of being under the sway of —and unwittingly serving—the self-destructive wetiko parasite. An aberration of the psyche, wetiko cannot be ultimately healed by merely bringing about external reforms (although such reforms are welcome and needed); it must be dealt with where it originates—within the human psyche of each individual. Wetiko can’t be “legislated” out of existence via political or social means, but can only be transformed within the individual, who, as Jung reminds us, is the real carrier of life. To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic tapeworm or parasite has taken over our brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite.

Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms and beliefs into our mind which, when unconsciously enacted, feed it, and ultimately, like a fatal addiction, kill its host—us. Beyond informing our addictions, wetiko psychosis is itself the addictive process taking living form so as to take life. Savaged by the ferocity of their unending hunger, people who are sufficiently infected by the wetiko virus, like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist cosmology, have become possessed by an insatiable craving that can never be filled. Not in possession of their true selves, they try to possess something outside of themselves to both escape from and fill the void within—the result is a futile and never-ending grasping. Attempting to secure a self that by its very nature is illusory and thus can never be secured, their appetites can never be quenched, just as an illusion can never be satisfied.

At the collective level, this perverse inner process is mirrored in the outer world by the consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending and mostly unnecessary desires, conditioning us to always want more. As if starving, we are in an endless feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless spiritual void. In this regard, wetiko can be likened to a psychic eating disorder. If the planet were seen as a single organism, and people seen as cells in the greater organism of the planet, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic, and had turned on themselves, destroying the very organism of which they are a part. Wetiko can be compared to an autoimmune disease of the psyche that is getting collectively acted out, writ large on the world stage. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism, in its attempt to protect itself against perceived attacks, attacks projected aspects of itself that falsely appear to be “other,” leading, ultimately, to its own self-destruction.

Bewitched by its own projections—as if hypnotizing itself—the autoimmune system of the wetikoized psyche has fallen under its own self-created illusion and in its state of confusion and trauma, is tricked into creating the very problem it is trying to resolve. One glaring example of how this internal process is getting acted out in the external world: the way our nation is fighting terrorism is creating ever-more terrorists, as if in fighting a fire we are pouring fuel on it. Once the wetiko virus takes root in our minds and incorporates itself in the world, it “manages our perception” by framing the terms of our inner and outer dialogue through determining the metaphors which dominate the accepted historical narrative, thus controlling the parameters of our conversation and debate.

The consensually agreed-upon thought-forms and beliefs act as an intrinsic, built-in control system, defining the limits of what we imagine our possibilities are, as individuals, nations and a species. If we don’t consciously tap into and use the power of our creative imagination, others, particularly “the state,” will be more than happy to do so in our stead. Just like vampires, full-blown wetikos have a thirst for the very thing they lack—the mystical essence of life—that is, the “blood” of our soul. Wetiko is a deceptive spirit that apes, mimes and imitates the real thing—called the Antimimon pneuma (literally, “counterfeiting spirit”) in the Apocryphon of John (Apoc. John III, 36:17). Impersonating us, if we identify with wetiko’s false version of ourselves, we have then identified with who we are not while simultaneously disconnecting from—and giving away—who we actually are. We then become a duplicate, a copy of ourselves, losing touch with the original. Wetiko is an expert at imitation, but it has no creativity on its own. Once it “puts us on,” i.e., fooling us into buying into its version of who we are, it can then piggyback onto and plug into our intrinsic creativity, co-opting our creative imagination to serve its malevolent agenda.

When we fall under wetiko’s spell, our life-force and God-given creativity become vampirically drained, as we are bled dry of what really counts. This situation is a reflection of what happens when wetiko infects an organism (be it a person or species)—certain aspects within its bio-system become starved. In essence, when we are under the thrall of wetiko, the creative spirit within us, the very function which connects us to something beyond ourselves, becomes malnourished and impoverished. We then can’t even imagine things being any other way, let alone being able to actively imagine a way out of our dilemma. 

This points to the profound importance for each of us to intimately connect with the creative spirit living within us as a way of abolishing wetiko’s death sentence. Many of the institutions in our world are embodiments of the formless wetiko virus taking on corporeal—and incorporated—form. The counterfeiting spirit of wetiko, a true imposter, imitates something but—in a process known as countermimicry—with the intention of making the copy, the fake version, serve a purpose counter to that of the original thing or idea. For example, the entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of wetiko disease “in business.” A “real” economy has to do with the production and distribution of goods and services—generating wealth in the process—while the virtual “bubble economy” that we living in is mainly an exercise in profiting from the manipulation of money—draining real wealth in the process. It is as if wetiko has managed to create a simulation of the real economy, replacing the real thing with a copycat version (what I call the “wetikonomy”) that has inverted its original purpose. This is a reflection in the outer world of the covert operations of wetiko within our minds.

FINDING THE NAME

Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, manifesting itself both in the way we are looking at the world as well as the unspoken ways we have been conditioned—i.e., programmed—to not perceive. Wetiko has the power to induce—both individually and en masse—what writer Philip K. Dick calls a “negative hallucination,” i.e., instead of seeing what is not there, we cannot see what is there. When we are afflicted with wetiko, we literally are unable to see what is right in front of our face. Wetiko is a form of psychic blindness that not only believes itself to be sighted, but believes it is more sighted than those who are actually clear-sighted. This looking away, this “conspiracy of denial” that is endemic to our culture is simultaneously both the cause and effect of wetiko.
Because wetiko is a psychic blindness, the cure for wetiko starts with seeing it—both seeing how it operates in the world and also tracking how it covertly operates within our own minds. In the medical model we describe the various pathogens that make us sick as cancers, bacilli, parasites, plagues, viruses, etc.. Due to the materialistic culture we live in, we are attached to the idea that for something to have “reality” it must be made of a material substance. The implication of this perspective is that if something is not physical it is not real, which disables our capacity to see wetiko. Though “immaterial,” wetiko is as real as we are. We have to name something, however, before it can be seen, formally “discovered,” and brought into our shared collective cartography. To quote Jung, “For mankind it was always like a deliverance from a nightmare when the new name was found.” Mythologies and fairy tales the world over have been expressing this from time immemorial—finding the name of the offending demon takes away its power over us.


This is why it is important to introduce the word “wetiko”—and the idea it represents—into our planetary dialogue. Once we become more acquainted with the idea of wetiko and all that it entails, we can “spread the word”—creating a new meme in the process—thus conjuring up a living antigen to the heretofore unrecognized mind virus of wetiko. For nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come—wetiko is just such an idea, pregnant with new possibilities. Similar to how a vampire hates the light of day, however, the wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined, for in seeing how wetiko covertly operates through our own consciousness or lack thereof, we not only take away its seeming autonomy and power over us, we empower ourselves.

Seeing the correlation between the inner and the outer—which is to say, seeing the dreamlike nature of reality—is the doorway through which we develop the requisite vision to see wetiko. In a dream, the inner psyche of the dreamer is expressed through, and is therefore not separate from, the outer forms of the dream. Similar to a dream at night, in the waking dream called life, events in the outer world symbolically—and synchronistically—express the inner psychological situation of the dreamer, which is all of us. We don’t have to try to create or fabricate this correlation between the inner and the outer; rather, we simply have to recognize it, for it is always already the case. Once we realize the dreamlike nature of our situation, we have started to develop the eyes to see wetiko, and hence, dispel its malevolent effects. We have then broken the seeming curse we have fallen under (please see my book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil).

A CATALYST FOR HUMAN EVOLUTION

People taken over by wetiko—a word Jung never used, but in his writings he referred to the same idea by the phrase “totalitarian psychosis”—are often attracted to positions of power, where, as if compelled by forces beyond themselves, they can’t help but to create scorched earths as outer correlates to the inner ravaged landscape of their souls. Insanely enough, many of the people who are most taken over by wetiko are not in asylums, but are freely running around (and running) the world, oftentimes established in positions of great power to influence world events. Fueled by the myopic vision that prioritizes the bottom line of corporate-driven profits above anything else, people motivated by the greed of the wetiko virus have little meta-awareness of the long-term and whole-system implications of their rapacious actions.

All that the wetiko bug craves is to satisfy its narcissistic desires, experience orgasmic release, and glory in the seeming victory of short-term profits. Hiding behind the deceptive banner of “progress,” the Frankenstein monster of ever-enlarging empire, with its incessant, greed-driven need for endless growth, is like a runaway locomotive gaining speed, approaching the catastrophic event horizon of its inevitable crash. Meanwhile, this “progress” destroys people, families, communities and threatens our entire species, as we potentially trigger a “sixth mass-extinction event.”

At the heart of wetiko is our identification with and subsequent grasping onto an illusory “me,” a seemingly separate, independent self which doesn’t actually exist in the way we think it does. Clinging onto this false sense of self—a “lethal mirage” that becomes a self-perpetuating addictive process with a life of its own—our life-force then gets continually invested into protecting, defending and maintaining an illusion. Identifying with a self-constructed illusion whose originating conditions remain obscure is the stuff of which madness is made. Reciprocally co-arising with the subjectively convincing and self-validating feeling of a separate “I” is the feeling of “mine,” the sense that this “I” can possess and own things. Modern humanity is, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, “demented with the mania of owning things.” We insanely devote so much of our time and energy—our precious human life—in trying to obtain material goods that we really don’t need and that bring no real benefit to us. Speaking of the white man, Chief Seattle said, “His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.” Along similar lines, Sitting Bull said, “the love of possession is a disease with them.” This love of possessing things to fill a void that can never be filled is wetiko disease in a nutshell. Wetiko is a collectively “dreamed up” phenomena in which we are all ultimately implicated.

This means that—at least in theory if not in practice—we have the capacity to dream it differently. In other words, because we’ve created wetiko, we can “un-create” it. We don’t yet know how to do this, however, or we wouldn’t be continuing to create it in a way that is destroying us. Our unconscious process of dreaming up wetiko in all its full-blown destructiveness is the way we are teaching ourselves how to not destroy ourselves, which we evidently haven’t yet learned or we wouldn’t be destroying ourselves. The fact that we wouldn’t have realized how to not destroy ourselves without wetiko’s arrival on the scene is to say that the seeming curse of wetiko actually has a hidden blessing secretly encoded within it. Wetiko is a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains superposed within it both the deepest darkest evil imaginable, while hidden within it is its own medicine.

Encoded within wetiko’s pathology is not only its own cure but a precious gift, as it can—in true quantum style, “potentially”—introduce us to our own agency in calling forth our experience of both the world and ourselves. In other words, the wetiko epidemic is revealing to us our nature as empowered co-dreamers/creators of a universe that is more malleable, plastic and dreamlike than we have previously imagined. Similar to how the unconscious compensates a one-sidedness in the psyche through the dreams it sends our way, the totalitarian psychosis/wetiko running rampant throughout the world today is the psyche’s way of revealing to us that we are forgetting the crucial role it plays in creating our experience. Marginalizing our own authorship and authority, we then dream up totalitarian forces to limit our freedom and create our experience for us.

The “totalitarian psychosis” known as wetiko is, in Jung’s words, “forcing us to pay attention to the psyche and our abysmal unconsciousness of it. Never before has mankind as a whole experienced the numen of the psychological factor on so vast a scale.” Literally demanding that we pay attention to our own psyche, wetiko is thus the greatest catalyst for human evolution that our species has ever encountered. Wetiko can literally destroy our species through wrenching poverty, endless war and catastrophic environmental destruction. Or, if confronted, named and understood, it can introduce us to the dreamlike nature of reality, which changes everything.

Wetiko is a living revelation that only reveals its gifts to us, however, if we recognize what it is a reflection of within ourselves. How it manifests depends upon how we dream it. The choice is truly ours. It is as if through the instrument of wetiko, a higher intelligence is revealing to us the wholeness of our totality through our darker side. This darkness is revealing light by contrast to itself. As we recognize that the evil we see playing out in the world is a reflection of our own darkness, we notice that, paradoxically, with our increase in consciousness the good and positive features within us come more to light too. As we more and more recognize the correlation between the outer world with what is going on deep within our soul, the enlightened aliens, who have been signaling to us the dreamlike nature of our situation by synchronistically arranging events in the world to reflect back what’s going on deep within us, hide behind the scenes, laughing.


A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (Authorhouse, 2006). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years. He is the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.

[1] Following in Jung’s footsteps, I use the word “psyche” in an all-inclusive sense, meaning the totality of psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious.

[First posted 20 December 2016]