It should get our attention that every person or group of people that have discovered what the Native American people called wetiko unanimously consider it to be the most important topic—there’s not even any competition—to understand in our world today. To give one example: Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan refers to wetiko (though by a different name) as “the topic of all topics.” Called by many different names throughout history, the spirit of wetiko renders every other issue secondary, for wetiko is the over-arching umbrella that contains, subsumes, informs and underlies every form of self-and-other destruction that our species is acting out in our world. If we don’t come to terms with what wetiko—which can be conceived of as a virus of the mind—is revealing to us, nothing else will matter, as there will be no more human species. Wetiko inspires the darkest evil imaginable while, at the same time, potentially helps us to wake up to our true nature as creative beings. How wetiko winds up actually manifesting depends upon whether we recognize it as the on-going revelation that it is—it is showing us something about ourselves that is of supreme importance for us to know.

What makes a “wisdom tradition” worthy of the name is whether or not it illumines the covert operations of the wetiko bug. In my writings I am continually expanding my articulation of wetiko as I broaden my learning—I never cease to be amazed when I find yet another tradition steeped in wisdom pointing at wetiko in its own unique and creative way. Wetiko can be thought of as being a parasite of the mind that operates through the blind spots of the unconscious in such a way that hides itself from being seen as it deceives us into thinking and acting in ways contrary to our best interests. In addition to independent researchers like myself, many artists have also been creatively and imaginatively expressing the insidious workings of wetiko psychosis in a wide variety of mediums.

To use one example: Colin Wilson, in “the supernatural metaphysical cult thriller” The Mind Parasites, first published in 1967, is using the fictive power of the literary imagination to give living form to this virus of the mind. The more I studied Wilson’s book, the more I had the overwhelming impression that he was really onto something—i.e., that he was tracking the elusive footprints of wetiko—and that he had chosen the form of a fictional narrative to describe, circumscribe and elucidate the nature of this deadly mind virus that threatens us all. It is as if Wilson was waking up to the psychic parasites that were within not only himself, but all of humanity, and his activated unconscious was using the vehicle of the literary imagination to express this realization.

Oftentimes creative artists are the canaries in the coal-mine of humanity’s psyche, presciently giving communicable form to what is emerging within the collective unconscious of our species. Sometimes the work is so informed by the artist’s unconscious that the artists themselves aren’t consciously aware of what they are revealing. When an artist is bringing in something new, there are usually varying degrees of consciousness around what is coming through them, as their work is the result of a creative interaction between their conscious and unconscious minds.

I am so accustomed to writing about wetiko “non-fictionally,” that the idea of approaching it through the made-up medium of fiction, i.e., through creative art that isn’t as “serious” as nonfiction, opens up new orders of freedom within my soul. Wetiko can be likened to a “bug” that hampers the creative imagination—potentially even “killing” it, if it’s even possible to talk in such fatalistic terms about imagination—which is to say that it makes sense to use the creative imagination as a way of dealing with its imagination-killing effects.

In his book, Wilson’s main character—an archaeologist named Dr. Austin—is stunned to learn of the suicide of his friend and colleague, a psychologist named Karel Weissman. Austin’s astonishment is due to his feeling that Weissman “had not an atom of self-destruction in his composition. In every way, he was one of the least neurotic, best integrated men I had ever known.” In Austin’s words, “It was impossible. Such a man could never commit suicide.” In his shakily written suicide note, Weissman expressed his wish that Austin take charge of his scientific papers. Austin finds it curious that Weissman wanted Austin to be contacted immediately after his death, wondering why the urgency and whether Weissman’s papers contained a clue regarding his friend’s suicide. And so the story begins.

When Dr. Austin began searching through his now deceased friend’s scientific papers, he was struck by the line, “It has been my conviction for several months now that the human race is being attacked by a sort of mind-cancer.” This sounds remarkably like the wetiko virus—which can be conceived to be a cancer of the psyche that slowly metastasizes, gradually subsuming all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself to serve its nefarious agenda. Wetiko is a self-devouring operating system that leaves nothing untouched, ultimately killing its host as well as itself if it is not stopped.

At first Austin wasn’t taking Weissman’s idea literally, but as he read on, he realized that his friend was not speaking metaphorically, but rather, was quite serious. In reading Weissman’s extensive “cultural history” of the last couple hundred years, it became clear to Austin that Weissman was of the opinion that our species had fallen into an age of darkness, and felt that some sort of darker force had insinuated itself into humanity’s mind. Upon initially encountering Weissman’s seemingly paranoid and conspiratorial line of thinking, Austin’s knee-jerk reaction was to assume that his brilliant friend had gone truly insane. After reading Weissman’s carefully reasoned analysis, however, Austin began to wonder if maybe his friend wasn’t crazy after all, but rather, had actually stumbled onto something really profound. Feeling that he would remember this day for the rest of his life, in Austin’s words, “If Karel Weissman was not insane, the human race confronted the greatest danger in its history.”

Continuing to read his friend’s papers, it became clear that Weissman had been doing an exploration inside of his own mind, and he was beginning to realize that there was something “alien”—an “autonomous other”—living inside of him that appeared to have its own independent will that was resisting his inner investigations. To quote Weissman, “I became aware that certain inner forces were resisting my researches;” it was as if these inner forces didn’t want to be illumined. This wasn’t a passive form of resistance; whatever these inner forces were, they were involved in active resistance, as if being discovered was their worst nightmare.

Relying on “ignorance to keep the human race in chains,” these negative forces not only feed off of our ignorance, they actively promote it. Weissman was beginning to realize that these inner forces were simultaneously feeding off, reinforcing and hiding within his unawareness, as if his psychic blind-spots were the open doorway through which these forces insinuated themselves into his psyche. Weissman wrote, “I knew why it was so important to them that no one should suspect their existence. Man possesses more than enough power to destroy them all. But so long as he is unaware of them, they can feed on him, like vampires, sucking away his energy.”

The more Wilson’s creative fantasy unfolded on the pages of his novel, the more my ears perked up—I began thinking, “here is a man after my own heart”—as I recognized that he was pointing at wetiko, which is a vampiric bug that operates within our psyche in a clandestine way, draining our life-force in the process. In Wilson’s novel, Weissman, as if passing on a precious gift to his friend, was transmitting what he had stumbled upon to Austin, who, once he realized what Weissman had discovered, continued his deceased friend’s investigations by following in his footsteps. Descending into the depths of his own mind, Austin wound up corroborating what Weissman was insistently pointing at by having his own direct experiences of the seemingly “alien” forces that had now taken up residence in his own mind.

In reading Weissman’s papers, Austin—and the reader—are becoming aware that Weissman was making an epochal discovery. Speaking about the mind parasites, Austin writes that “they had also established themselves at a deep level of the human psyche, where they could ‘drink’ the energies that human beings draw from their wellspring of vitality.” The main channel through which these vampires work is consciousness, or more specifically, our lack thereof. It was vital for these vampiric-like entities to keep us in ignorance of their existence, for once we began to wake up to their covert operations within our minds, their gig is up, as they would then have no power over us. Weissman wrote, “Once a race becomes aware of these vampires, the battle is already half won.”

These darker forces will do everything in their power to avoid being “outed,” including trying to inspire the person who is onto them to turn self-destructively on themselves in suicide. When someone gets close to illuminating these darker forces, they can obscure the person’s connection to their intrinsic life-affirming creativity so that their creative life-force turns against itself and gets acted out self-destructively, potentially even resulting, in extreme cases, in suicide. This puts Weissman’s suicide in a deeper context, as his act of self-destruction becomes more comprehensible once we see what he was in the process of exposing. Getting closer to the light within ourselves simultaneously illumines these vampiric forces and catalyzes them, as being illumined is their worst nightmare, which is to say that the closer we get to the light, the more fearsome the forces of darkness can appear.

This can help us to understand the known psychological fact that the greatest danger for suicide is right before someone is going to have a breakthrough. Demons typically make their worst stink right before they are vanquished. This understanding can also help us to re-contextualize when we experience seemingly darker forces getting evoked in our mind-streams. For example, when we feel “attacked” by what seem to be the darker forces of the psyche, instead of interpreting this as evidence confirming how screwed up we are, we can realize that this is an expression that we are getting closer to the light within ourselves; shadows are not merely the absence of light, but are also an expression of its presence. In other words, the more light there is, the more the darkness becomes activated and visible. Since the darker forces want to derail us from our path, we can learn to understand that their manifestation is a reflection of exactly the opposite—that we are on our right path. We tend to think of illumination as “seeing the light,” but “seeing the darkness” is also a form of illumination.

Reflecting on the position he found himself in as he tried to communicate his discovery to others, Weissman writes that it is “more probable that people would simply dismiss me as insane.” For when someone has seen these mind-parasites, which is to be in touch with a deeper level of our basic sanity, to the ones still afflicted by and unconscious of these entities—i.e., the majority of our species—the one who is pointing out what is actually happening is typically seen as insane. I can totally relate to Weissman’s predicament; it is as if he is describing the situation I’ve found myself in for most of my life.

In his journal Weissman writes, “the human mind has been constantly a prey to these energy vampires. In a few cases, the vampires have been able completely to take over a human mind and use it for their own purposes.” These vampires can possess someone, who unwittingly becomes their secret agent—their secret being secret even to themselves—as they then become the channel through which these higher-dimensional forces actually enter into our third-dimensional reality and enact their seemingly counter-evolutionary agenda. The person so possessed—without being aware of their depraved circumstance in the slightest—becomes a marionette on a string, the human instrument for these nonhuman darker forces of deception to act themselves out in our world.

In taking over someone’s mind, these “deceivers”—members of “the un-dead”— replace it with a spurious simulation of their own dead and automated psyche, one devoid of creativity. The person so possessed identifies with this counterfeit version of themselves, assuming the mind they are experiencing is their own—while the truth is that what they then experience as themselves is anything but. Instead of being themselves, they become a duplicate of themselves, a master copy. The Bible itself points at this—referring to the mind parasites as the antimimon pneuma, the “counterfeiting spirit,” which is to say they impersonate us, with the hope that we identify with their false version of who we are. Interestingly, the revered Gnostic text Pistis Sophia claims that the antimimon pneuma has affixed itself to humanity like an illness.

Having our minds co-opted and taken over by these “energy vampires” can happen (in small or big ways) to anyone of us at any given moment in time—e.g., when any of us unconsciously acts out our unhealed abuse, indulges in our addictive behaviors, speaks falsely, or succumbs to “groupthink,” to use just a few examples. Here’s what I wrote in Dispelling Wetiko, “To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic 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.” Not just capable of taking over an individual’s mind, these mind-parasites can operate through and possess a group, a nation, or even—potentially—to varying degrees, our entire species. Wetiko is, after all, a “collective” psychosis.

Most of humanity is being influenced by “hidden” (which is one of the meaning of the word “occult”) forces operating deep within our unconscious minds in ways that profoundly impoverish the quality of our awareness, all the while not having the slightest realization that this diminishment is even happening. These malevolent forces occlude us in such a way that our occlusion becomes self-perpetuating, the result being that we can’t even tell we are occluded. Once our mind is “programmed”—massaged into shape—by the mind parasites, we become more like automatons and zombies than creatively alive human beings. Speaking of people who have fallen under the thrall of these sinister forces, Austin comments that they “were moving mechanically – mere chess men in the hands of the mind parasites.” If we ask people in the grips of the mind parasites why they are acting out in the unconscious habitual way they are, they will often have a ready-made rationalization and justification. Their “cover-story” unknowingly serves the agenda of the mind parasites, as it camoflauges these sinister entities’ operations within their own minds so that they continue to remain ignorant of the source of their own impulses, thoughts, beliefs and actions.

Austin writes, “once a human being has been ‘conditioned’ by the mind parasites, he is like a clock that has been wound up; he only requires attention once every year or so. Besides, Weissman discovered human beings ‘condition’ one another, and save the parasites work.” This is similar to when there is an abusive agent in the family system, they typically just have to act out their violence only once—the mere possibility of them acting this out again gets across their message loud and clear and keeps the family “in line.” We then only occasionally need their attention to remind us of the threat we are living under, which becomes internalized within our own minds. Groups of people so conditioned can easily enact their inner state of fear and limitation in such a way that they police themselves, acting as their own control system—they then become complicit in keeping each other asleep. Anyone snapping out of the programming is seen as a threat by those still under its spell. Most people become so accustomed to their confinement—it seems “normal,” just the way things are—and not knowing anything different, they easily become complacent, satisfied and actually “happy” with their current state of limitation, confusing it with freedom, thinking they are simply being in touch with “the real world.”

In Austin’s words, humanity was struggling “as if in the grip of an invisible octopus.” Describing the multi-headed hydra quality of these darker forces, Austin comments that they are “something I can only compare to an immense, jelly-like octopus whose tentacles are separated from its body and can move about like individuals.” Austin was describing the nonlocal aspect of the tentacles—the arms—of wetiko, which, coming through different people or aspects of the environment, seem separated but are actually coordinated and connected parts of a greater “body” in which they are all contained and of which they are all expressions. To quote Austin, “I had been wrong to think of the parasites as separate beings.” There was one deeper energy—seemingly originating from a higher dimension than the merely physical—that was animating all of the multifarious manifestations of the mind parasites. In other words, something seemingly plural was actually singular in nature that, significantly, is to be found within our inner depths.

Weissman writes, “it is so important for the mind vampires to keep their presence unknown, to drain man’s lifeblood without his being aware of it. A man who defeats the mind vampires becomes doubly dangerous to them, for his forces of self-renewal have conquered. In such cases, the vampires probably attempt to destroy him in another way – by trying to influence other people against him.” Though appearing like he was having paranoid delusions, this statement by Weissman indicates that he had become aware of the nonlocal nature of the mind parasites, which is to say that—sounding totally “sci-fi” or crazy—these vampiric entities are not bound by the conventional laws of third-dimensional space and time.

From the sound of his writings, Weissman was beginning to realize that these mind parasites, not being a localized phenomena that could be pinned down, were a field phenomenon, and could only be seen—and dealt with—once recognized as such. Being a field phenomenon, the mind parasites existed in a realm that interfaced with and connected both the outside world and our minds. These entities simultaneously operate through our consciousness as well as being able to somehow configure the seemingly outer environment so as to enact themselves in embodied form as a way of accomplishing their agenda. They organize themselves—be it through creating inner or outer obstacles—so as to oppose any effort (including this very article) that brings attention to their stealth operations to larger circles of people.

It is important to know what we are up against; as the adage goes, “know your enemy.” If we do manage to connect with the light within ourselves and try to share our light with others, these nonlocal vampiric entities (what I have in previous writings called “nonlocal demons,” or NLD for short), will try, via their “connections” to the nonlocal field, to stop us by influencing other people to turn against us. Austin writes, “they [the mind parasites] knew how to use other men against us, and this was the real danger.” When someone begins to wake up, it is as if the forces of darkness, through the “control system” built into society and its institutionalized structures—which have become internalized within people’s minds—becomes alerted and mobilized in such a way as to make sure the person who is becoming aware of the operations of these inner adversaries and beginning to remember who they are gets taken back down, silenced, and put back to sleep. The mind parasites are able to “draft” unsuspecting others to become portals through which these forces can exert their influence into our world so as to seduce, distract or obstruct us from our path. People who are asleep to these nefarious forces unknowingly become enlisted to be the zombie-like foot-soldiers of the mind parasites, unwittingly serving their agenda of making sure no one steps out of line.

I wonder how many people who have been diagnosed with mental illnesses—who oftentimes complain of feeling strange alien energies living inside of their own mind trying to control them—are actually having inchoate experiences of the mind parasites, but haven’t developed enough fluency or awareness to be able to deal with their situation. Well-meaning psychiatrists then pathologize and medicate them—all for their own good—but might these psychiatrists be the unwitting instruments through which the mind parasites are able to carry out their dirty work?

Weissman wrote, “Now I suspect that these mind vampires specialize in finding races who have almost reached this point of evolution, who are on the brink of achieving a new power, and then feeding on them until they have destroyed them.” In addition to the weak and defenseless, these psychic vampires seek out people who are on the verge of a quantum, evolutionary leap in consciousness, but have not yet fully integrated their realizations and stabilized themselves in the higher, more coherent level of consciousness that they are beginning to access. These individuals are in an energetically sensitive and “charged” condition, and their openness and vulnerability invites these vampiric entities to gorge on the light of their prey’s expanding awareness, thereby preventing them from having enough energy to evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Like moths attracted to the light of a flame, these darker forces are particularly attracted to people who are actively engaged in consciousness raising activities, seeking truth, and speaking out about it with the intention of helping to awaken others.

Continuing his articulation of these mind parasites, Weissman continues, “It is not their actual intention to destroy – because once they have done this, they are forced to seek another host. Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle.” This sounds so similar to what I wrote in Dispelling Wetiko, “It [wetiko, i.e., the mind parasites] doesn’t want to kill us too quickly, however, for to successfully implement its agenda of reproducing and propagating itself throughout the field, it must let the host live long enough to spread the virus. If the host dies too soon, the bug would be prematurely evicted and would suffer the inconvenience of having to find a new residence.”

As he was beginning to realize the intent of these mind parasites, Weissman continues, “Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards.” The strategy of these predators is to distract us so as to keep our attention directed outside of ourselves, thereby stopping us from finding and utilizing the immense light of intrinsic awareness within ourselves, which would “kill” the vampires by rendering them impotent. Wetiko is only able to flourish when we are in “object-referral,” focusing our attention on the outside world—thinking the problem is outside of ourselves—as compared to when we are in “self-referral” (i.e., self-reflection), in touch with our immense creative power as observer/participants to shape our experience of both the world and ourselves.

Austin writes that “their chief power seems to lie in their ability to unbalance the mind.” Either creating or feeding off of the natural potentiality of the psyche for dissociation, it is as if the mind parasites split the mind and compel a one-sidedness where we lose touch with our intrinsic wholeness and the full spectrum of possibilities that are always available to us. Inspiring and then feeding off of the resultant polarization, the mind parasites exploit, take advantage of, piggyback on and encourage people’s unconscious tendency to project their shadow outside of themselves. To quote Austin, the mind parasites “keep man looking for his enemies outside himself.” As long as we seek the enemy outside of ourselves, our true adversary, who lives inside of our heart and is the very sponsor of our projection, gets off scot-free.

Austin continues, “the chief weapon of the parasites was a kind of ‘mind-jamming device’ that could be loosely compared to a radar-jamming device.” It was when the mind parasites knew a person was “onto them” that they would use whatever measures were at their disposal to obfuscate themselves so as to keep their covert operations hidden. Austin writes, “The parasites had always used this ‘obstructing’ method against the human race – deliberately distracting the mind when it begins to get to grips with its own secrets.” Interestingly, in the highest spiritual teachings, the one and only instruction is to not get distracted from recognizing and abiding in the true open-ended nature of our awareness.

In Weissman’s writings, it was becoming clear to him that these mind parasites weren’t just messing with individual people’s minds, but were wreaking havoc through the collective unconsciousness of our species, a process that was playing out en masse in the world theater. He wrote, “I think there can be no possible doubt that the wars of the twentieth century are a deliberate contrivance of these vampires.” It is as if “the beast” of war is a virulent collective incarnation—in living (and dying) flesh and blood—of these mind parasites writ large on the world stage. If we look at the state of the world today, once we cultivate the eyes to see these psychic vampires, we notice their influence everywhere throughout our planetary “culture” (or lack thereof).

Through his deepening insight into the depth of the darkness that was animating these mind parasites, Weissman was also beginning to realize, as becomes clear through studying his writings, that there was a hidden gift encoded in these nefarious entities. He writes that “the mind vampires are, without intending it, the instruments of some higher force. They may, of course, succeed in destroying any race that becomes their host. But if, by any chance, the race should become aware of the danger, the result is bound to be the exact opposite of what is intended.” This brings to mind Goethe’s masterpiece Faust, in which Faust asks Mephistopheles (who represents the devil) who he is, and Mephistopheles replies that he is the “part of that force which would do evil, yet forever works the good.” The idea is that encoded in the darkness is actually a force that would potentially serve the light, if only it is recognized as such. Weissman writes, “The vampires might serve, therefore, to inoculate man against his own indifference and laziness.” The mind parasites/wetiko literally demand that we step into our power and become resistant and immune to their deception, trickery and oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free—or else!

The mind parasites are “quantum” entities, which is to say they are in a superposition of states—containing both the deepest evil and/or the highest good. On one hand, it is as if these mind parasites are obstructing us from experiencing our true nature. And yet, if recognized as such, these mind parasites could potentially help us to discover the very light they are obscuring. They are true guardians of the threshold of our evolution. How they actually manifest depends upon whether we recognize and how we interpret what they are revealing to us.

The mind parasites/wetiko’s appearance on the scene is in some mysterious way related to humanity waking up to its true nature as divinely-inspired creative beings. These seemingly darker forces are obscuring this nature, while at the same time their deadly challenge is the very thing that is, paradoxically, helping us to discover, wake up to and connect with our true nature. For if humanity were to break free and withdraw its fixation on outward appearances and connect with the universe within, to quote Weissman, “He would suddenly realize that he possesses inner-powers that make the hydrogen bomb seem a mere candle.”

In a very real sense, these mind parasites “cure” us of our wrong attitude towards both the world as well as ourselves. Instead of a typical virus mutating so as to become resistant to our attempts to heal it, the wetiko virus forces us to mutate relative to it. It is as though the evil of wetiko is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence. This higher power, through the revelation and understanding of wetiko, connects us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves that makes “the hydrogen bomb seem a mere candle.” In Dispelling Wetiko I write, “The wetiko bug is the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known—as well as not known—to humanity.”

Sometimes we have to try to imagine what’s happening in order to gain access to reality. By creating a made-up fantasy world, it is as if Wilson, like the proverbial figure of “the fool” in the King’s Court, is “making light” of what is actually taking place as a way of getting the word out and telling the truth. Telling his story as if it’s fiction—i.e., not true—enables Wilson to break the taboo against speaking the truth in a world where to do so is fraught with peril, even criminalized. Sharing his tale as if it’s merely a fictional product of his creative imagination skillfully allows him to bypass the flaming editorial swords of the gatekeepers of consensus reality with a liberating knowledge that would ordinarily—if put out as a factual warning to humanity—be seen as disruptive and taboo from the point of view of the powers-that-be.

Ironically, if what Wilson is saying is true—i.e., that malevolent forces have infiltrated both our world and our minds—by presenting this information as if it’s merely fiction, he’s protecting himself from a retributive attack from the very mind parasites that he’s pretending only exist in his fantasy novel. As if a member of a timeless underground resistance movement, Wilson has managed to sneak in “living information” into a world that is unknowingly imprisoned and in desperate need of exactly such knowledge. Interestingly, while writing this article, I felt the mind parasites doing everything they can to stop me from getting this information out. Maybe, of course, this is only my overly activated imagination. In any case, I can easily feel like I am living in Colin Wilson’s mind parasites novel.

The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson is a beautiful and powerful example of someone giving themselves creative license to express an aspect of our experience that—because it operates in the shadows of the psyche—usually goes unrecognized and easily becomes marginalized. The idea of mind parasites invading both our world and our mind sounds completely and utterly crazy, but sometimes an idea is so crazy that it just might be right.

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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 Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father(Awaken in the Dream Publishing, 2015), 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, and facilitates a number of “Awakening in the Dream Groups” every week, in which people who are awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality come together in a way that helps everyone deepen and stabilize their lucidity. 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.