Has a Spell been caste upon the unsuspecting masses? Does the apparent mass-psychosis of an allegedly sentient species suggest a stealth contagion both insidious and pernicious? The concept is not new, and Native Americans went so far as to coin the term Wetiko to acknowledge the phenomenon.
Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity.
Paul Levy has thoroughly dissected this issue with his two ground-breaking works Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World and Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. On this episode Paul guides us on a journey of freedom through the portal of awareness.
Paul attended State University of New York at Binghamton receiving degrees in both economics and studio art. While an undergraduate, he was hired by Princeton University to do research in economics. When he graduated college, he stopped his studies in economics and pursued his career in art, moving out to the Bay Area, where he was both making, and teaching art.
It is a disease of the soul, and being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have Wetiko, as it pervades and “in-forms” the underlying field of consciousness.
Common to many trail blazers of the Spirit, Paul had a life-changing spiritual awakening following an ntense personal trauma in which he began to recognize the dreamlike nature of reality.
In 1993, after many years of struggling to contain and integrate his non-ordinary experiences, Paul started to openly share his insights on how life is a shared waking dream that we are all co-creating and co-dreaming together.
Wetiko induces in us a proclivity to see the source of our own pathology outside of ourselves—existing in “the other.” Wetiko feeds off of polarization and fear—and terror—of “the other.”
As a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 30 years, he has intimately studied with some of the greatest spiritual masters of Tibet and Burma and served as the coordinator of the Portland chapter of the Padma Sambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years. Paul is the founder of the Awakening in the Dream Community in Portland, Oregon.
Show links:
https://www.awakeninthedream.com/
