This topic is in response to Waakzaam’s post under the forum topic: “Wishing I had seen the PNAC document before 9/11.” I thought the article referenced by Waakzaam should be given its own topic.
It’s a long article, so below, I’ve summarized some important parts for you.
From http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/?p=534
Forbes writes, “The overriding characteristic of the wetiko is that he consumes other human beings, that is, he is a predator and a cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease.”[ix] Predators, ‘full-blown’ wetikos are not in touch with their own humanity, and therefore can’t see the humanity in others. Instead, they relate to others either as potential prey or as a threat to their dominance. As if a different breed who is more animal-like predator than ordinary human being, someone fully taken over by the wetiko psychosis consumes others lives, physically, emotionally, psychically and meta-physically, beyond just the material body and physical possessions to the level of meaning itself. Wetikos are the ‘anti-artists’ of our culture, embodying the opposite of what creative artists do. Unlike an artist (please see my article “The Artist as Healer of the World”), who creates life-enhancing meaning and enriches the world without robbing others, a wetiko takes and consumes without giving anything back, continually draining and impoverishing the planet of resources.
Many of us can’t fathom the level of evil to which full-blown wetikos have fallen prey, and of which they are capable. Our lack of imagination of the evil existing in potential in humanity is a direct reflection of a lack of intimacy with our own potential evil, which enables the malevolence of wetiko to have nearly free rein in our world (please see my article “Shedding Light on Evil”).
Once the parasite becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person’s behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one calling the shots. Just as someone infected with the rabies virus will resist drinking water, which would flush out the infection, someone taken over by the wetiko parasite will have nothing to do with anything that will help them get rid of the disease. Wetikos are phobic towards the light of truth, which they avoid like the plague. In advanced stages, this process takes over the person so completely that we could rightfully say the person is no longer there; they are just an empty shell carrying the disease. In a sense there is just the disease, operating through what appears to be a human being. The person becomes fully identified with their mask, their persona, but it is as if there is no one behind the mask.
Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness. Its vectors of infection and propagation do not travel like a physical pathogen. This fluidly moving, nomadically wandering bug reciprocally reinforces, feeds off of and into each of our unconscious blind-spots. Collaboratively supporting their mutual psychosis, groups of people drawn together by the unconscious can potentially become a socio-political force with which to be reckoned. When a group of people are in agreement about anything, whether it is true or not, their alignment with each other exerts a contagious, magnetic field-of-force which can sway and attract the unaware into itself.
People taken over by the wetiko virus usually don’t suspect a thing about how they have been ‘conned.’ Once under the wetiko spell, they lose the capacity to recognize the wetiko pathology in others.
Forbes writes, “one of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of wetikoism is arrogance.”[xxvii] In being ‘full-blown,’ wetikos are arrogantly puffed up with their own self-importance, i.e., ‘inflated.’ Instruments for evil, wetikos are arrogantly, ignorantly and self-righteously convinced they are in possession of the truth and working for the highest good. It is as if they are unable to know that what they are doing is evil, unable to register their actions as anything other than good.
Speaking about the rapidly spreading wetiko contagion, Forbes writes, “It is spread by the wetikos themselves as they recruit or corrupt others. It is spread today by history books, television, military training programs, police training programs, comic books, pornographic magazines, films, right-wing movements, fanatics of various kinds, high-pressure missionary groups, and numerous governments.”
Encoded within the deadly pathology of wetiko is an insight and revelation which is its own cure (please see my article “Shadow Projection is its own Medicine”). Its own self-revelation, wetiko disease provides its own psychic medicine, but in order to receive its healing ‘benefits’ we have to recognize and more deeply understand this miracle in psycho-spiritual health care. How amazing – the very thing that is potentially destroying us is at the same time waking us up. A potential catalyst for our evolution as a species, we are all co-creating and dreaming wetiko up together. Wetiko is a truly quantum phenomenon, in that it is the deadliest poison and the most healing medicine co-joined in one superposed state. Will wetiko kill us? Or will it awaken us? Everything depends upon if we recognize what it is potentially revealing to us. The prognosis for wetiko/malignant egophrenia depends upon how we dream it.
The cure will be presented in Part 2 of THE GREATEST EPIDEMIC SICKNESS KNOWN TO HUMANITY by Paul Levy.
I am not sure what can be done for people who've "lost their soul to the devil." I can and do and will continue to pray for them. And, I will look for Paul Levy's part 2.
John
from:
THE GREATEST EPIDEMIC SICKNESS KNOWN TO HUMANITY: PART 2
Note: I consider this series of articles one of the most important things I’ve ever written. If after reading it you feel so inspired, please forward this to all of your friends and lists. The next, and last part of this series will be coming soon.
VAMPIRE SQUID ECONOMICS:
A CASE STUDY IN FULL-BLOWN WETIKO DISEASE
In part one of this article, I contemplate a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.
Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy’), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.
The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the “Big Wetikos,” who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race’ in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,’ as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook’ through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash’ and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the “Big Wetikos,” who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.
Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy’s fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement’ resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn’t bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.
The over-leveraged wetiko economy is a ‘phantom menace,’ in that there is hardly any real substantial value changing hands except in appearance. Unlike a real economy that is based on, backed by and generates genuine wealth, the wetikonomy, because it has no conventional solid, objective, substantial reality, has only a phantom-like, apparent existence. It is as if authors of a fantasy novel or a fairy tale are trying to ‘market’ and ‘sell’ their creation as nonfiction, and we, as consumers, are ‘buying’ it, believing it to be true. Collectively pretending the fiction is real, we have forgotten that we are playing a mass game of ‘make believe.’ The bubble economy of wetiko is a con-fidence game (a ‘con’ game), a con-struct of our mind maintained in each moment by the belief that the system is real, solvent and legitimate.
A virtual, synthetic economy such as ours is a product cooked up by the fevered imagination of the wetiko financiers. Like a collective dream, or a mass spell, it is a concoction based upon mutually shared agreements among its participating members. The wetikonomy in which we live, unlike a free market economy, is subject to the intervention of and manipulation by the central bank, an entity which has interposed itself between us and the market. The agency of the central bank, in its attempts to interfere with and control a natural, self-regulating marketplace, is a living symbol of the wetiko pathogen and how it disrupts a living system.
Just as a vampire can’t stand to be seen and thus avoids the light of day at all costs, as it is only able to operate by the deceptive cover of darkness, so the very nature of the institutions and operations by which the phantom wetikonomy functions must be kept hidden from the light of public awareness. The financial instruments of the wetikonomy are purposely crafted to be incredibly complex and hard to understand so as to hide and obfuscate the theft that is happening. Hiding the reality of what they are doing is one of the ‘chief features’ of wetiko finance. Replacing transparency with opacity, it has become standard account-ing practice in the wetikonomy to ‘cook the books’ so as to avoid being held account-able. If clearly illuminated and exposed to the light of collective disclosure and transparency, the shell-game and Ponzi scheme that IS the global financial system will be revealed to be the staggering and unlawful deception that it is. In a vast computerized web of electronic transfers and accounting shenanigans, the global economic system has become an insanely desperate pyramid scheme, a high-tech casino-like scam. A monstrous, planet-wide Madoff-like rip-off done with smoke and mirrors, the wetikonomy is like a massive optical illusion that is projected by the Big Wetikos, a cadre of master spell-casting wizards, who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal to make their illusion seem real. The wetikonomy, like apparitions of majestic castles in the sky, is a magical display that captivates and holds spell-bound the credulous, semi-conscious masses, who are more than willing, based on their childlike need to hope and believe in an authority outside of themselves, to give away their power so as to quell their fear. This is a regressed form of magical thinking writ large on the world stage.
At first glance, an optical illusion looks one way, but when we investigate further, we can see the illusion for what it really is. If this grand financial illusion were to be unmasked and collectively seen through, the underlying and pervasive ‘fraud as a business model’ approach to running the global economy would reveal itself to be the spectral phantasm that it is. Once the seemingly rock-solid, concrete skyscrapers of the wetikonomy reveal themselves to be a stage set with nothing behind it, built on ever-shifting sand, it is not enough just to realize this and do nothing. It is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other. This sets the stage to re-engineer the system of wetiko-ized control mechanisms that, through locked-in contractual relationships, freezes the economy in a corporate, and wetiko-ized trajectory. The power structure in a wetiko-ized society is inherently fiscal instead of political, which is why political change doesn’t result in economic change. It is the banks that control the government, not the other way around. As our collective realization gathers momentum, however, such a process of waking up en masse could dissolve the wetikonomy to its empty core, bursting the bubble economy and collapsing the whole artificial edifice – the artifice – of fake finance, like the house of cards that it is. This realization lays the groundwork for a more enlightened financial and investment system grounded in real economics, a healthy environment and the cultivation of a humane human civilization.
The unsustainable illusion that is the wetikonomy, however, is based on and supported by violence or the threat of violence, from a personal level up to the capacity to collectively wage war, both visible and invisible. The ability and willingness to kill is not an illusion. This is why many people collude in supporting and perpetuating the illusion, for to not do so inevitably leads to some form of coercion, which is a subtle (or not so subtle) form of violence. In the highly uncivilized world of the wetikonomy, ‘might makes right.’ The nature of the beast that we are dealing with needs to be factored into the equation of how we creatively and strategically respond.
The wetikonomy, to use journalist Matt Taibbi’s infamous phrase describing the major global investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a “vampire squid” that is sucking, draining off and redistributing more and more wealth from the poor, and the formerly middle class, into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. This “great vampire squid,” to quote Taibbi, is “wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Unlike a real economy that creates wealth, the vampire squid wetikonomy, a global, organized crime syndicate, extracts and extorts wealth from the real economy and from real people like you and me. There is an actual creature called Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which literally translates as Vampire Squid from Hell, a living symbol and perfect description of wetikonomics.
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis
The Big Wetikos, are debt ‘pushers,’ in that they inject credit into the would-be victim, artificially enlarging, pumping up and ultimately poisoning the recipient. The more money owed the better, as the bigger the meal of debt off of which the predators will be able to cannibalistically feed. The bigger the debt, the deeper the pockets they can pick, and the more blood there is for the vampires to drink. They create VSID – ‘Vampire Squid Induced Debt,’ whose victims become its slaves and indentured servants. As it says in Proverbs (22:7), “The borrower is servant to the lender.” The modern-day, debt-based wetikonomy is designed to have an exponentially, ever-increasing debt that in principle can never be paid off, analogous to how in wetiko disease there exists an insatiable hunger that can never be satisfied. The economic system imposed on humanity by the rapacious Big Wetikos is a perversion of the original, wholesome meaning of the word ‘eco-nomy,’ which has the same root as the word ‘eco-logy,’ and refers to the harmonious management of a household. The wetikonomy, instead of creating value and wealth that can be shared by all, impoverishes and enslaves the vast majority of humanity while simultaneously enriching the Big Wetiko predators. Big Wetikos are the ‘anti-Robin Hoods,’ as they rob from the poor to give to the rich (themselves). The Big Wetikos buy up all of the assets that have tangible, real world value, like land for example, in exchange for their made-up fiat currency. Once the exchange is made, and they are in possession of the stuff of real value, they then devalue and debase the currency, which becomes ‘worth less’ as time passes. The people are left holding an empty bag, while the Big Wetikos are increasingly in possession of everything else of value. The Big Wetikos are financial terrorists, actively engaged in warfare against humanity, using weapons of financial mass destruction (WFMD’s).
In a wetikonomy, a perverse synergy occurs in the revolving door between government and high finance. The political system becomes a front for and extension of the banks. The United States Treasury is bankrupt, which is to say that it is owned by the banks. Having the upper hand, an international clique of banking elites are the ones who give the orders and, appearances to the contrary, choose the politicians who will occupy the positions of power to do their bidding. This is clearly evidenced by President Obama stacking his cabinet with the very same people who created the economic crisis in the first place, all of whom have intimate insider connections with and allegiance to a corrupt cabal of high financiers.
In a wetikonomy such as ours, the Big Wetikos who create economic crises get rewarded for their actions, gaining untold riches. Think of the bank bailouts, a criminal heist of historical proportions, where the banks blackmailed our nation, putting a metaphorical gun to our government’s head, threatening that if we don’t give them what they ask for, they will crash the global economy and we will have martial law. We acquiesced at the expense of our national sovereignty. True to form, there was very little accountability regarding how the banks used this money, and much of what happened to it is still a mystery. In the total opposite of what happens in a ‘real’ economy, in the bailout, money was invested and sucked into the least productive aspect of the economy – the financial system – all at the expense of the taxpayers. The Big Wetikos get the booty, and the risks and liabilities are then dumped onto the general population, increasing our nation’s debt, and turning almost everyone else into ‘serfs.’ The inevitable austerity measures, e.g., cuts in retirement benefits and social services, will then be put squarely on the backs of the working people. Taxpaying citizens will be forced to pay off the debt over decades of hard work and toil, as they become indentured servants to the bank. As it is said, ‘Crime that pays, stays.’ We live in a ‘klepto-plutocracy’: a ruler-ship by really wealthy thieves. We need to ‘wake up’ to that we are being taken for all that we are worth.
The result is the largest gap in the distribution of wealth between the rich and poor since right before the 1929 Great Depression, which creates enormous economic instability, a situation that the Big Wetikos can then use to their own advantage. This transferring of assets from the broad class of working people and entrepreneurs to the super-rich is no accident, but is purposefully being implemented by the cold-blooded, Big Wetiko banksters and power brokers, who operate as a global banking cartel, so as to continually centralize their power and control. Unfortunately, this isn’t some sort of wacky conspiracy theory. The evidence is all around us, fully visible to anyone who has the eyes to see. A global robbery is in progress; the Big Wetikos are enacting a financial coup d’etat of staggering proportions right in front of our eyes. It is quite symbolic that the one time in the New Testament that Jesus got really pissed was towards the money-changers. Big Wetikos in positions of power in high finance, manipulating the markets so as to loot the planet’s treasuries and precious resources, have become the modern-day pirates, ransacking and pillaging humanity and all living things. This real world process is an externalized reflection of the psychic coup d’etat being perpetrated by the wetiko bug within our own psyche. This is to say that we can recognize a deep process within ourselves as it is revealed to us in the seemingly outside world. Seeing this is to begin to spiritually awaken, as we aren’t just ‘waking up’ to the fact that we are being robbed, but are ‘waking up’ to the deeper, dreamlike nature of our overall situation.
The Big Wetikos are not just draining the resources of individuals, but are sucking up the real assets of and taking down the economies of entire nations around the world (Think of what is happening in Europe now, i.e., Greece and Ireland, and ever more so in the U.S.). One striking symbol of this process is the IMF (International Money Fund), a vampire squid-like entity if there ever was one. The IMF is essentially a bankrupt institution backed by a cadre of banks that are themselves mostly insolvent. The IMF is constantly on the lookout for real assets to scarf up so as to sate its voracious debt-driven hunger. When a country finds itself in financial dire straits (a crisis oftentimes created by a coordinated, criminal cabal of financial terrorists that are in league with the IMF), the IMF swoops in, and offers a seemingly beneficent, helping hand in the form of bailouts to the ailing country in their time of need. The IMF, however, effectively loots and pillages the country that it is purportedly aiding, for once the country accepts the IMF’s ‘help,’ the IMF winds up taking over the country’s real assets to pay back the loan, thus turning it into an economic hostage. Each country that the IMF subjects to its ‘economic shock therapy’ becomes a laboratory experiment by which it continually refines and perfects its financial weaponry. The crisis in Greece is a recent example of this sinister experiment in how to financially take down and extract the wealth from an entire country. The resulting austerity measures imposed upon the now enfeebled and hobbled country are akin to a modern form of feudalism. Subsequent to Greece, Ireland was taken down using the same tactics, and other nations (Portugal, Spain and Italy to name but a few) are in the cross-hairs of this internationally organized form of financial warfare.
As the wetiko infection progresses in the global body politic, the global economic system becomes gradually redesigned to exert more and more effective top-down control by the few over the many, to the benefit of the elite few. These very hard economic times we live in, unbelievably, are the times of the greatest profits for certain select corporate conglomerates in all of history. Are people aware of this eye-opening and mind-blowing fact? It is revealing that the very phrases used to describe the grand larceny occurring daily in and as the global financial system are terms that specifically apply to the psycho-pathology of wetiko disease, such as ‘predatory lending,’ ‘liar loans,’ ‘zombie banks,’ ‘disaster capitalism,’ ‘financial terrorism,’ ‘monster capitalism’ ‘voodoo economics,’ and ‘tapeworm economics,’ to name but a few.
The one thing the Big Wetikos are most afraid of, however, is large numbers of people seeing through their charade and realizing that the emperor has no clothes. If enough people clearly see what the Big Wetikos are doing – committing unconscionable crimes against humanity on a grand scale while they play roulette with our planetary inheritance – their gig will be up. This is an externalized reflection of how the wetiko virus within ourselves is terrified of being seen, for once the bug is seen, it is ‘out of business.’ The global financial system is a symbolic reflection openly revealing the psycho-spiritual disease of wetiko ‘in business.’
The wetiko economic system is a bribery system. The Big Wetikos give us a tiny, overflow trickle of the over-the-top profits they unjustly reap, in which we gladly share. We then pretend that we are ‘clean,’ that we are not complicit in the systematic evil that is playing out. We fall under the self-inflicted illusion that we are not responsible and are merely victims of the system, and yet, we are simultaneously feeding off and supporting the very evil of the system as it kills us. Energetically, on the level of the deeper, underlying field, we pay a steep price if we are buying into this Faustian pact with the Devil. We receive what appear to be benefits, wetiko ‘frequent flyer miles,’ so to speak, but at the ultimate cost of our own genocide. Similar to accepting candy from a predator, the rush of immediate gratification provides an apparent short-term benefit at the cost of our integrity, our freedom and ultimately, our lives. Our true power comes when we see our culpability and complicity in this process and accept our responsibility, thus enabling our ability to respond, which gives us the power to choose differently and change things.
The wetikonomy is both a symbol of and a portal through which we can see the bug of wetiko as it in-forms a living, yet diseased system emerging from the human mind. When we see the workings of the wetiko virus in any system, be it the financial system, the family system, or within our own selves, we are at the same time generating a living antibody of awareness which neutralizes the virulence of wetiko. Seeing how the global financial system is literally being animated and driven by the wetiko virus is to pop into a heightened state of awareness in which we are seeing a wetiko-ized system from outside of itself. We could only do this if we are beginning to see with healthy, wetiko-free eyes, and are thus separating and freeing ourselves from the toxic system. As we increasingly illumine the workings of wetiko, we more and more ‘distinguish ourselves’ from it.
Our real debt is to ourselves; we owe it to ourselves to take a closer look and in-form ourselves and see through the business of wetiko. We can discover how money can be used as a tool that helps us cultivate and share true abundance. The return on our investment of attention will truly stimulate the neglected real economy and further inspire deeper heights of lucidity. This allows us to tap into the place within ourselves that is untainted by wetiko, through which we can consciously leverage and redesign the system to our collective advantage, which is to say, for the benefit of all. Herein lies our power to overcome the plague of wetiko, and in so doing, to build a world that works for everyone.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/QoUWgI-c9g4
The next, and final part of this series exploring wetiko disease (coming soon!), wraps up this inquiry of ours into the nature of our apparent problem. Finding the cure for something like wetiko is an interesting idea….to be continued in part 3.
I would like to thank Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com, for our many years of discussion about integrating spiritual and economic phenomenon. For an excellent detailed case study of wetikonomics, please go to Catherine’s Dillon, Read and Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.
A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, (click here to read the first chapter). Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at [email protected]; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2011.
Great stuff John! Reminded me of a very interesting document I found a few years ago called Silent Weapons for a Quiet War. Social Engineering with perfected mathematical precision...
Silent Weapons For a Quiet War
This Psyche virus thing has come to mind recently while witnessing the primary behavior and associated behavior of the tea party movement. The genius of this particular viral insanity seems to be that it takes root and gestates in the lower 3 chakras and has its victims sincerely believing that they are doing "god's good work" so to speak. Misdirected zeal from the gut...
What you and Noa present here sure seems to confirm and well define the sense I had of some kind of spiritual or psychological viral infection that I could not put words to. Good to see the indigenous have been aware of such a thing for a very long time....
It would seem that "unawareness" is the vacuum the virus enters through...
This also gave more meaning (for me) to the art of appreciation. Appreciation is the art of being very aware, emotionally aware of that which is appreciated. this would be the art of leaving no vacuum or unguarded door, so to speak...
Conclusion: Social engineering depends upon willful ignorance, blissful unawareness of the masses...
One might even call it disingenuous irresponse-able innocence...
a biblical passage comes to mind too...
"be shrewed as serpents and innocent as doves"
the meaning of that keeps expanding as I grow older and a little wiser...
Something else comes to mind. It requires a complacent "us" to allow for, to make room (vacuum) for an industrious, capitalizing, malignate "them". One could easily conclude that we are doing it to ourselves while feeling like it is being done to us. We could so easily put an end to this ridiculous rented debt-based despotic monetary medium of exchange by returning to being fundamentally productive and finding others doing likewise to barter with... The real inconvenient truth!
"Although the so-called "moral Issues" were raised, in view of the law of natural selection it was agreed that a nation or world of people who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals who do not have intelligence. Such a people are beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice and consent."
"CONSEQUENTLY, in the interest of future world order, peace, and tranquility, it was decided to privately wage a quiet war against the American public with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy (wealth) of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few."
"In order to implement this objective, it was necessary to create, secure, and apply new weapons which, as it turned out, were a class of weapons so subtle and sophisticated in their principle of operation and public appearance as to earn for themselves the name 'silent weapons'."
"In conclusion, the objective of economic research, as conducted by the magnates of capital (banking) and the industries of commodities (goods) and services, is the establishment of an economy which is totally predictable and manipulatable."
from the introduction of Silent Weapons for a Quiet War
The only hope for us is a massive, spiritual awakening. And, of course, this always, only happens one at a time. It seems there are two dimensions to the process. Firstly, coming out of denial and learning about our collective shadow. And, secondly, coming out of duality and the illusions of separation and noticing, recognizing, then realizing our inextricable, innate interconnectedness and the fundamental and paradoxical nature of our self-cognizant emptiness/awareness.
Excerpts from:
SHADOW PROJECTION IS ITS OWN MEDICINE
by Paul Levy
The crisis in the Middle East between Israel and its enemies is a microcosm of the greater underlying conflict that is wreaking havoc on our planet. Just like any one part of a hologram contains the whole hologram, what is happening in the Middle East is a reflection of what is playing out both on the entire planet, as well as within ourselves. What is playing out in the Middle East is actually reflecting back to us, in full-bodied amplified form, a dynamic going on deep within the collective psyche of humanity. What this means is that we can more deeply understand how to resolve the conflict in the Middle East by understanding what it is revealing about ourselves.
In a previous article, “Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War,” I contemplated how the act of projecting our own darkness outside of ourselves is the psychological act which underlies and animates the human activity of making war. What is playing out in the Middle East is the materialization, in full-living color, of the process of shadow projection that is taking place deep within the human psyche. The more we understand the “inner” psychological act of shadow projecting which events in the Middle East are the “outer” manifestation of, the more we are able to effectively transform ourselves as well as our world. Paradoxically, shadow projection is “pathological” while simultaneously being its own medicine. It is in the act of shadow projection, whose source is the human psyche, that the fundamental cause of war is being revealed to us.
Shadow projection is a process that is playing itself out in our internal psychic landscape (intrapersonally), in our relationships with others (interpersonally), as well as transpersonally (collectively as a species on the world stage). The underlying psychological act of dissociating from our own darkness and projecting it outside of ourselves, whereby we see our enemy as the embodiment of evil, is a process that is happening in multiple dimensions of our experience simultaneously, both within ourselves as well as in the outside world.
In shadow projection, both parties, the projector of the shadow and the recipient of the projection, are unconsciously “re-acting” to their own projected darkness as it is reflected in each other, which just unwittingly feeds and perpetuates the very darkness they are reacting to. In essence, they are both asking the other to do something that they themselves are unwilling to do. For example, both Israel and its enemies want the other to stop attacking them, but they aren’t willing to stop attacking the enemy. This is the convoluted logic of a traumatized (national) soul being played out on the global stage.
Shadow projection always shares a mutuality between participants; each is doing the very thing they are accusing the other of doing. Jung said, “As events in wartime have clearly shown, our mentality is distinguished by the shameless naivete with which we judge our enemy, and in the judgment we pronounce upon him we unwittingly reveal our own defects: we simply accuse our enemy of our own unadmitted faults.”
To shadow project is to attract a shadow projection onto ourselves from the recipient of our projection as surely as the moon is reflected in water. Jung elaborated by saying, “For all projections provoke counter-projections when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject.”[iii]
We are intimately connected with those upon whom we shadow project. Jung said, “All projections are unconscious identifications with the object.”[iv] When we project the shadow onto someone, we are secretly identified with them. On a deep subconscious level, we are fused with them, which is to say we have not fully differentiated from them nor entered into genuine relationship with them, but are co-dependently entangled. The people projecting the shadow and the ones holding their projection are compulsively tied to each other by their mutual projections. Jung pointed out that this situation “…consists of mutual projecting into each other and being fastened together by mutual unconsciousness.”[v] They are bound together via the unconscious, and mutually feed off of and into and get triggered by each other’s unconscious shadow.
The people (or nations) we project the shadow onto simultaneously embody and play out the very shadow we are projecting, and it is impossible to tell which came first or caused what- their manifesting the shadow, or our projecting it. In a circular, synchronic, cybernetic feedback loop, our adversaries are concurrently pulling the shadow projection out of us by embodying the shadow, while we are evoking out of them the very shadow we are projecting. This acausal and non-linear process is beginingless in time, with no first cause.
The paradox of shadow projection is that on the one hand it is divisive and creates separation and conflict, but on the other hand it is revealing to us how we are secretly united with our enemies, and hence can be (potentially) the very way in which we learn how to make peace. Shadow projection, the psychological act which is the root of war, is simultaneously the very medium through which we realize that, ultimately, we are all on the same side. We don’t want to shadow project onto shadow projecting. Shadow projection is a natural function of human consciousness, with both a divisive and reconciling potential. Shadow projection is the very means through which we (potentially) realize our wholeness within ourselves and our oneness with each other. How utterly paradoxical, the root of all of the destruction in our world is itself the very thing that is (potentially) waking us up. It all depends upon if we recognize what is being revealed to us.
Levy presents it so clearly. And now to bring it down to concrete reality:
Americans by and large think that we are blessing the world with our unique combination of democracy and capitalist wealth. We believe our system is good for us and we are doing a favor to other nations when we share it with them. Hence, we are willing to destroy and rebuild nations like Iraq and Afghanistan in our own image because we are so darned sure they really want to be like us. Our shadow is that we cannot see that other nations have their own culture, love their own culture, and want to make their own choices. We cannot see the ugliness of an American Empire forcing itself on other peoples all over the world.
Here in America, we never see two things: (1) caskets of our own service people coming home, and (2) the massive carnage of dead civilians whom we have killed to "pacify" those two nations. It is no accident that our news media never shows these things or that the American public does not know that we have killed between a quarter and a half million Iraqis. I don't know the figure in Afghanistan, but I'm sure it's commensurate. It's incredible that we don't know these things and they are not reported on our news. How can we really know what we are doing there if the whole picture is never reported? If it were reported, we might wake up to just how ugly what we are doing is.
And then there is the shadow on the other side. The Muslim extremists believe they are justified in hating the American Empire because of what I described above, but when is hate ever justified? When is is it ever justified to attack the civilians of another nation by indiscriminate bombings as they did on 9/11 and continue to do in their bombings around the world? In reality, if they had power, as they did in Afghanistan under the Taliban, they too would create an empire and would impose their way of life on those whom they control. There really is no difference between the extreme Muslim mindset and the American Empire mindset. Both disrespect the right of the other, and all others, to choose their own beliefs and their own way of life.
Only when we see and confront our own ugliness will anything change. Americans need to see on our news media the tens of thousands we are killing, and Muslims need to see the same from the perspective of those whom they are killing. Perhaps the UN needs to sponsor a film in which cameras rove around the world capturing the murders and the effects on the families and neighbors of those murdered without showing the identities of the perpetrators. Then intersperse all the ugly images without regard to the perpetrating nation or organization so that it is not possible to see only our enemy doing these things but to see ourselves doing it right alongside our enemies. Perhaps then the UN could create a traveling film fest or Internet film site that shows people around the world what all of us are doing to each other. Would it wake people up if they see only the horror we all create and not the justifying propaganda of their own side? It just might.
Chuck
So it's basically 20,000 in Afghanistan and 900,000 in Iraq. Those numbers stagger the mind. How can we do such a thing?! I'm in grief knowing that so many have been killed.
Chuck
Dear Chuck:
You can see the Iraqi and Afghan body counts at http://www.gatheringspot.net/topic/community-portal/why-death-innocents-essential-american-life as well as Perakee's post on a similar subject.
Noa