“I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible. This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension.” – Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969

Wetiko is not only highly communicable but also self-replicating. It persists, clandestine in our psyches. Generally, human hosts, when confronted with questions about symptoms being expressed as behavioral abnormalities, vehemently deny that they are infected/possessed. Some who have studied this psychic pandemic describe wetiko as a form of cannibalism, but not in the common flesh-eating form. This ubiquitous form consumes others’ spiritual energy as a means of securing elevated personal status, wealth and supremacy.

At bottom, wetiko is a disease of the “I.” The “I” thought is a precursor to “full-blown” Wetiko. Without the I thought — attributing I to identification with thought and the world of appearances — Wetiko would not be possible. See: Who Am I? https://www.amazon.com/Who-Am-Sri-Ramana-Maharshi/dp/1537599216 Ramana Maharshi teaches to get to the root. In other words, the absence of self-reflection leads to a pretentious sense of I (me, my, mine), which attributes an illusion of ownership to thought, therefore, the host perceives everything as “a thing,” an object to be possessed.

Wetiko is an Algonquin-Cree word for a cannibalistic/parasitic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). Cree is one of the major Algonquian-speaking tribes who inhabited the area from the Hudson and James bays to as far west and Great Slave Lake in what is now called Canada.

Wetiko deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others commands the host to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement. Spirit energy is kidnapped and consumed by the parasite. This may explain the recent obsession with electro-magnetic field (EMF) research into frequency manipulation, behavioral manipulation and other forms of environmental influences. A full range of electromagnetic radiation is being incorporated into a widening spectrum of nanotechnology to increase the speed moving further away from nature toward a greater dependence on machine. Mind, body, soul; some invisible (to us) form of lethal, alien force seems determined to use a full spectrum approach, including most recently nanoparticle applications enslave and control man like a child operates drone aircraft, or a remote-controlled toy car or other robotic toy. My question today: Is the operator human, AI, a hybrid, or something completely unknown to us?

Wetiko causes a blindness that hijacks the individual’s ability to see itself as an integrated/ interdependent element of a delicately balanced universe. This idea of separateness elevates the ego to grand, new heights, which creates a false, but convincing, illusion of separation of self from nature, which is expressed as greed, excess, and selfish consumption.

PAR’ASITE, noun [Latin parasita; Gr. by, and corn.]

1. In ancient Greece, a priest or minister of the gods whose office was to gather of the husbandman the corn allotted for public sacrifices. The parasites also superintended the sacrifices.

2. In modern usage, a trencher friend; one that frequents the tables of the rich and earns his welcome by flattery; a hanger on; a fawning flatterer.

3. In botany, a plant growing on the stem or branch of another plant and receiving its nourishment from it, as the mistletoe.

Many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Sufism (the mystical branch of Islam), Taoism, Gnosticism, as well as many Indigenous cultures, have long understood the mind-based nature of creation. These worldviews have at their core a recognition of the power of thought-forms to determine the course of physical events.

Various First Nation traditions of North America have specific and long established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form that causes it: wetiko. We believe understanding this idea offers a powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global polycrisis.

Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very advanced, they can personify the disease: ‘a wetiko.’ This holds true for cultures and systems; all can be described as being wetiko if they routinely manifest these traits.

In his now class Their minds rustle with million dollar bills
You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket
And Gold burns a hole in your soul
Well, uranium burns a hole in forever
It just gets out of control.
– Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Priests of the Golden Bull”

What we can say is that the fingerprints of wetiko-like beliefs can be traced at least as far back as the Neolithic revolution, when humans in the Fertile Crescent first learned to dominate their environment by what author Daniel Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture” — i.e., settled agricultural practices that produce more food than is strictly needed for the population, and that see the destruction of any living entity that gets in the way of that (over-)production — be it other humans, ‘pests’ or the natural environment — as not only legitimate but moral.

The point is that the epidemiology of wetiko has left clear indicators of its lineage. And although it cannot be pathologized along geographic or racial lines, the cultural strain we know today certainly has many of its deepest roots in Europe. It was, after all, European projects – from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, to colonialism, imperialism, and slavery – that developed the technology that opened up the channels that facilitated the spread of wetiko culture all around the world. In this way, we are all heirs and inheritors of wetiko.

We are all host carriers of wetiko now. Our disassociation from nature, and our true selves, is nearly complete. The Great Simulation has you, by the ….. you know what.

If you’ve wondered just what the actual “matrix” is, look no further than the legal system you are caught in like a fly in a spider’s web. But the source is not what you think! For you are the temple. You are the source. You are the spoon. Wakey wakey, good people of this beautiful earth.

Time to actually wake up!

Systemic change begins with the mutations at the periphery, and we are the mutations we’ve been waiting for! The necessary adaptation for survival has become the valuing of people over profits, relationships over stuff. Abandoning the current paradigm (with love), adopting an attitude of forgiveness (everyone is always doing the best they can with what they have in the moment, nobody is to blame, everyone is response-able) are good first steps, and the journey ahead is a long one. We are the variant the universe needs to achieve a higher level of human consciousness.