Paul Levy's blog

As we shed light on wetiko, and become sensitive to its movements within ourselves, there is no place for the spirit to hide. The spirit of wetiko needs to be 'contained'; this is the archetypal point behind the sacred alchemical idea of a mystical vessel which transforms the entire universe. Part Three in a series.

A psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. The global financial system is the revelation of wetiko disease.

For thousands of years a psychological disease has been informing human self-destructive behavior.  A psychosis in the true sense of the word as a "sickness of the soul," this illness is at the root of humanity's inhumanity to itself.

The psyche has a pre-eminent place in the natural order of things. The life of the psyche arises out of organic life, while at the same time transcending it through its own self-creation.  A product of cosmic evolution, the conscious psyche is a relatively recent emergence out of the womb of nature.

Encoded in the birth of the self-conscious, separate self is its own self-liberation. The moment of self-consciousness is the portal through which we can step out and let go of ourselves in the service of compassion.

When I was first introduced to the world of psychiatry in May of 1981 at 24 years of age, I experienced a particularly unique synchronistic event that rocked my world and changed my life forever.

In its initial stage, a spiritual awakening can look like a nervous breakdown. My experience was so off psychiatry's map that it wasn't even remotely recognized. I was immediately labeled as sick.

The Evolver Social Movement -- which includes Evolver and Reality Sandwich -- is like the switchboard of the "turned on" global brain, one that not only connects different parts of ourselves with each other, but further activates the very awakening of which it itself is a living expression.

To deny or distrust our own perceptions is to reject our authority as author of our own experience. It takes courage to stand for our experience when our perceptions are not validated by others. In not disassociating from our experience, we are on our way to becoming autonomous individuals.

Compassion is the fuel of awakening, the cause and effect of seeing through the primal boundary of self and other and becoming lucid in our shared, waking dream.

Far from a thing of the past or an ignorant superstition, demonic possession and evil spells, in our technologically developed society, are an increasing danger. C. G. Jung has given us modern terms for these very real states, uriging us to make exorcizing ourselves "the most vital task of civilization."

When the alchemists had a living experience of God through their relationship with the imaginatively created philosophers' stone, they realized that the whole experience was nothing other than an experience of the divine imagination, which is to say that they were realizing that they themselves were living inspirations of the divine, creative imagination itself.

The root meaning of the word consciousness, etymologically speaking, is "knowing together or seeing with an other." The process of becoming conscious requires both seeing and being seen, knowing and being known. The birth of consciousness itself involves being both subject and object of the process at the same time.    

To the alchemists, creating the philosophers' stone was analogous to waking up to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Becoming lucid in the waking dream is seen as a reflection of God's ongoing creation of and incarnation into the world.

The repressed, unlived lives of parents act like a psychic virus creating disease in the family system and larger environment. If we can understand how the transmission of child abuse works, maybe we can genuinely begin to heal the world.

Do we “dream up” our own psychoses? Whether we consciously know it or not we are continually enacting archetypal dynamics that have been passed down through the ages. These transpersonal processes have an impact on everything, including our own mental health.

Trauma warps the emotional and psychological lives of human beings. Understanding how trauma operates in the psyche and exhibits itself through behavior in the outer world can help us to illumine the underlying process animating events in Gaza.

Our awakening is always a mutual and reciprocally shared co-awakening due to our infinite interconnectedness. Moved by something greater than our imagined self, we become an instrument of something much vaster than our own limited version of ourselves.

Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality – moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering an open doorway to lucidity.

Lucid dreaming is one of the most empowering tools to transform us from passive witnesses to active collaborators in our own dreaming process. But dream work can lead us to wonder: who is dreaming and who is awake? Are most of us asleep?

The God-image is like a dream that we are dreaming that is simultaneously dreaming us. In a radical re-visioning of itself, the unconscious has offered us in the symbolic figure of Mercurious an image of God which includes and embraces evil as an integral aspect of our wholeness.

The shamanic archetype is one of the major processes that is becoming animated in the collective psyche of our species. It creates a synthesis of the conscious mind and the unconscious, a further evolution in the incarnation of a more all-embracing, integrated and expansive consciousness. 

While working as Book Service Manager for the C. G. Jung Foundation, I had a chance encounter with one of the world's leading experts on dreams. I will never forget what he told me.

Art-making is a sacred act. Art attains its greatest numinosity and ability to affect others when the creator of the work of art is being transformed by the act of creating. One can mimic sacred art for a living (many people get paid for this) but this is mere forgery. There is a world of difference between copying, imitating, and aping sacred art, and living our own creative experience. When we live creatively, guided by our daemon, our life itself becomes a living work of art.

What is being played out in Burma is a living "symbol" of a deeper, mythic process which is currently enacting itself in a variety of scenarios around the world. Being a timeless, archetypal process that has materialized into our time-bound reality, it can be seen as an amplified version of what can happen in the U. S. We can only recognize what is symbolically being revealed to us if we realize that the people in Burma, both the monks and the military thugs, are not separate from ourselves.