The Wetiko Mind Virus: Counteracting Self-Sabotage w/ Paul Levy # 463

Aubrey Marcus
What is that force of resistance that works within us and beyond us? That inner saboteur, that harsh inner critic? We all know the feeling of when this force is acting upon us. I call it anti you. And Paul Levy, the guest for today's podcast, has spent his life studying this force, and he uses the native american term we Tico.

He's written several books on the subject, is truly a subject matter expert on what this force of negation is and how to combat it in our lives and in the collective. I can't wait to share this podcast with Paul Levy. But before we get started, a word from our sponsors. First up, we have mud water. So if you guys have been listening to the show for a while, you know that I've been talking about mud water for years, because I've been using mud water for years.

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And now an uninterrupted podcast with Paul Levy.

Paul, we're here to talk about the devil by another name and to speak about that other name. This is how I would like to get into this. The word Witiko is a word that you've taken from traditional native american cultures and beliefs and, of course, made it a great part of your vocation in life's work to explicate it, to help us understand how this force of negation acts against us, how we can respond, how we can illuminate all of its different maneuverings to actualize the best version of ourself. But you chose this word, and I'm curious about your journey to discovering this word and this belief system. Where it came from, because there's many words for witico across many traditions.

Where did you come across the word witiko and where did it click? Yeah, well, I first came across it because it articulated my own personal experience I was having, and it's not like I need to go into the story, but I was having this direct encounter with evil, and not just personal evil, but archetypal evil in my family. And through the instrument of my father, he was the one who was taken over, and I'm the only child, and I was the recipient of it. And I was young. I had no name for it, no understanding.

Paul Levy
And then fast forward, and there's a whole story that I don't need to go into, but we probably will go. Into it, but we'll put a bracket on that now, right? Okay. Yeah. So my first book that I had written in early two thousands, I didn't know the name Waitico, but I knew what I was like.

What is this thing that I'm encountering? And at that point, I called it malignant egophrenia. Me disease. Me disease. So it's a misidentification of who we think we are.

And as I was finishing up that first book, I came across a book by an indigenous scholar. Columbus and other cannibals was the name of the book. And Forbes, Jack Forbes was the author, and he was a professor. And it was all about Juatico. And my eyes fell out of my socket as I was reading the book because it was precisely 100% articulating what I had been pointing at.

And I just thought, well, this is the sacred name. It's an indigenous name. So instead of feeling like I'm appropriating the name, no, I just wanted to honor the indigenous tradition. And so that's when I began. I would use the name Waitco.

And the more I understood the indigenous wisdom, they were tracking this for centuries. And in the west, it was something, there were different names for it, but it wasn't in, like, the common vocabulary. And so that's when I wrote my first book on Waitiko. And I guess the other thing that I wanted to say, I mean, there's a lot I can say about it, but I had the recognition that Huatico, or whatever name you call it, but I was using the name Waitcoming, that it's at the bottom of the madness and the evil that's playing out collectively in our world, that it's at the very root of it, both individually in our own psyches, how we play out our own self destructive patterns, how we enact our shadow and sort of in abusive ways in relationship and as if iterations of a fractal that was inter nested in each other, what's playing out collectively on the world stage. And so then, just to complete the thought, I began to understand that this close encounter I had of the Waitiko kind in my family through my father, that it was that encoded, holographically encoded in that experience, was the very evil that's informing and giving shape to the body politic of the world.

And so that's what's really inform my work. And now I've written three books on Waitiko, and probably we'll have a lot more coming out too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a well that goes all the way to the depths of hell, you know, to the depths of the void itself in the cosmos. Right.

If I can just say one thing about that that's so trippy is that people are really into, oh, Christianity and Christ on the cross and the resurrection. But what happened in between, there's three days where he descended into hell. And I point out that's very symbolic, that it's like, yeah, you can't get to the resurrected body without the descent into the darkness. Yeah, your leaves will only stretch to heaven to the degree that your roots reach down to hell. I think that's a jungian concept.

Right, right. Totally. I 100% agree. And, of course, we have some similarities in our story in that ultimately, my father was battling with Tycho for his whole life, really, because it came through his father and then was transmitted to him. And he made a solemn vow to try and do as much work as he possibly could to liberate me enough from whatever was plaguing him.

Aubrey Marcus
He didn't have a name for it. He would call it his shadow or his trauma or whatever kind of psychological work. He was studying psychology at Johns Hopkins, and he was really trying to look at it from the psychological lens. Then he went in through the shamanic lens and tried to explore it in breath work and primal therapy and all of these different techniques to try and actually work with it. But I really believe that if he would have had early enough, had a name and been able to name it, my father was a competitor.

He was such a great competitor, whether it was on a chessboard or a tennis court or the financial markets, where he was a commodities and futures trader, just a maverick, right? If he would have been really able to articulate it and understand it and disambiguate it from himself, know that it's inner included in himself, but also separate from himself. I think he would have been able to harness that competitive mindset, and I think he would have been able to liberate himself, but he didn't have the knowledge. And so one of my intentions in writing my book about this is to tell my father's story and my story to help people give it a name like you have, and then allow them the tools and techniques to be able to meet that force and then use that force as a self actualizing force of evolution that draws us to our highest potential. Right, right.

Paul Levy
It's so interesting what you shared. I mean, two things come up. Like, on the one hand, you know, just in, like, a typical sort of fairy tale, when the hero finds the name of the demon, that's the key moment, because that's when they. And, you know, and it symbolizes when you find the name that means you're seeing it. Because the thing about Waitiko, it works through the blind spots.

It works through the unconscious. And because you can't see it, then it will kind of inspire you to act it out unconsciously, compulsively, you know? And so that's one thing, finding the name is so important. The other thing that you just said, my head exploded because you were describing your father, and you said, oh, he was doing work on himself, and doing where my father, it was completely the opposite, you know, I mean, for however many decades, I was trying to reflect and process with him, and he was having none of it, and he wasn't interested in doing any work on himself. I just became the identified patient.

Cause when I had my whole awakening in 1981, and it was a direct result of just overwhelming trauma of what my father acted out. And then I just began acting from consensus point of view, so crazy that I immediately got thrown in hospitals and diagnosed and guaranteed I'd have this illness for the rest of my life, and I'd need to be on medication. And all the while, I was having a mind, like, a mind blowing, this life transforming spiritual awakening. But for the rest of my life, my father, I became the identified patient. You were just mentally ill, and you were just sick and in denial of your sickness.

And the whole wall, I was like, I was tracking. I was going, wow, there was something coming through my father. And it helped me to understand that this waitiko, which is sort of a higher dimensional energy, which doesn't have a particular form, it can take on any form, but it's like it just itself is empty of any form that it can actually take over. A person. And the person could become possessed.

And my father was the revelation of that. So it was actually like helping me. The fact that my father was so totally, he was oblivious to his situation that he was taken over. And all the while it was teaching me something. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
In my own construction of the model, you look at a line. So polarity is represented by a line, the two poles of a line. And on the two poles of the line, you have anti you on, let's say, the far left side of the pole, which is the absolute negation, an absolute anti life energy looking to destroy, degrade all things. And that's what's true, right? Beautiful.

Paul Levy
That's right. So that's. I call it the anti you, right? And then on the other side is what I call your potential. Now, the Greeks might call it your daemon.

Aubrey Marcus
You could call it. You use the word angel in there. You call it also your, you know, I think in internal family systems, Doctor Richard Schwartz calls it the self, right? Or your higher self. There's lots of words for that.

But it's the thing that's drawing us forward of what is possible as us in an actualized self. So you could put someone like, let's say in my model, Jesus Christ, for example. Let's say the stories about Jesus are accurately represented, which I believe that they very likely are. Yeshua actualized his self's potential by becoming the Christ, right? Like he went all the way to the right side of the pole, where he was ontically identical.

He was very real with his actualized self potential, right? He had the unique self potential to become the Christ. And that was his path. But somewhere in the middle was Yeshua, who was in the battle between his anti you, Witiko, or the devil or whatever you want to call it, and his potential, the Christ, which was coming. Now, I don't think everybody necessarily, I'm not saying everybody has the potential for Christ, but we all have our potential for what that form might be on the other side.

And then, so you are somewhere in between that pole and the choices you make. The awareness you have allows you to travel one way or another on that pole. Because as what's happened with your father and with my father, in the end, they became not ontically identical with the potential, what their actualized self could be, but what the anti you could be. Maybe not all the way to the darkest level, like hitlerian darkness of that, but very close to that force of negation of life and the destruction of his own life and his family that kind of created. And so it's this battle, really, as I see it, where you are moving on this kind of sliding scale between anti you and your potential.

Paul Levy
That's so right on. That's beautiful. And what that brings up in me, as you were describing that is just think about the Christ event, where he's on the cross, and I really, in my work, try to bring out, and Christ himself says this in the apocryphal text. It gets edited out of the Bible, but he's basically instructing his disciples to see what was coming through him symbolically, like it was a dream. And when you see the crucifix symbolically, it's like holding the creative tension of the opposites.

And if you're able to hold that in awareness without prematurely just, oh, let me identify with this side and exclude that side that creates this disease in the soul. But it's not an easy process. It's very agonizing, and it can be really painful. But if you hold that creative tension, out of that comes the creative, out of that comes the resurrected body. Or there are a lot of different names for it.

And so that's what you're pointing at. And that's where in my work, I'm consistently pointing out that the medicine, I mean, there are a whole lot of ways of describing what the medicine for Waitiko is feeling, getting in touch with compassion, with love, seeing the dreamlike nature, but also accessing our creative spirit. Because people say, and I'll say in my work, oh, the real antidote for Waitiko is to connect with your true nature. And that's true. But what does that mean?

And I point out, well, what is our true nature? And our true nature, by its nature, is creative. So when you actually connect with your true nature, you embody and express yourself creatively. And the more you do that, the more you deepen your connection with our true nature in a positively self reinforcing feedback loop. And in a way, that's why, again and again, when I work with people, we all are creative, but so many people have these blocks or resistance or stuck.

And I'm always interested in, okay, what happens right there. And it's an interesting thing to really inquire, because what typically happens is I always get to the point where I try to show people how they're colluding unconsciously with their own victimization. Yeah, yeah. That deal with the devil, so to speak. Right, right.

The fauci. Impact with the devil. Right, yeah. You use the word resistance. And to me, this was a major step forward in my understanding of this force.

Aubrey Marcus
When I read Steven Pressfield's war of art, right, and he actually externalized this force and also recognized that this force moves in you as you threw you, but it's also beyond you. And the externalization of it was actually really helpful. Right? Cause he gave resistance a name, and he made it a force. And this was a force that was acting against you.

In Pressfield's words, anytime you were moving from a lower place to a higher place, moving towards actualization or creation. And it was really built around, it's the war of art. It was built around the creative process, because we encounter with Tycho when we're trying to create. Now, whether that's creating on the athletic field or creating in the artistic field or creating in the spiritual field or creating in the romantic field, being that creator, you're going to encounter this force. And it's just, I think it was really informative to me to be like, okay, now I'm starting to track the scent, you know, like I'm on the track.

Paul Levy
Right. Well, what you were just saying, it's so cool because to externalize that force, like, you know, I'm really into Jung, Carl Jung, when I found him, it really saved my life in a way. And one of the major things he talks about is to these unconscious forces is to give them a shape, give them a form to externalize them, to objectify them. Because when you objectify them, you actually distinguish yourself from them. Yes, there's the force.

Here's me, and I'm separate from the force. Because the way these unconscious forces, the way they operate and how come they have so much power is we unconsciously identify with them. So then we can't see them because it's the filter through which we're seeing. And so that sense of externalizing and objectifying, it's like it's the way we exercise Waitko in ourselves. And then Jung goes on, then we do active imagination.

There's all these words to put on it, but the key thing is to give it a shape, give it a form creatively. And this is the stories. We have so many stories that illuminate this battle, and even the stories of imagine typical exorcisms scene, right? What the person who is under the spell of some demon and has been taken over by some demon. And I'm not trying to claim the veracity of these in the traditional catholic kind of frame, but the story, just take the story itself.

Aubrey Marcus
What the person fails to be able to do is fails to be able to say, here I am. And here's the demon that's expressing through me. Right, right. They're unable to actually form that split same in a movie like the Body Snatchers, where it's not a demonic force, but it's an alien force that comes over, a parasitic force that comes through. They're unable to distinguish themselves.

And in a lot of the healing that you see in the films, it's some friend with love that's reminding them, like, I know you're still in here, right? I know you are still in here yourself. Your real, true self is in here, and you can liberate yourself from this force. It's always a part of the healing in all of these stories. And I think these stories come from the collective unconscious, this field, and are speaking through the stories, even if the writers of the stories don't know exactly what they're saying.

Paul Levy
Right? No, exactly. It's the higher self, it's the collective unconscious itself, which is actually giving voice and inspiring these stories, which are, like, from a dreaming point of view, they're symbolic of what's actually happening. Because it's interesting, you had said something about invasion of the body snatchers, and I had written a recent article about that's what's happening in our world. There are people, you know, what the.

Okay. In a sense, there is a real war going on, and it's the war on consciousness. And so many of us have been propagandized or under mind control. And part of propaganda is that when you take it in and it takes over your mind, you don't even know you're under propaganda, and you think you're in possession of the truth, and then you just unconsciously become a parrot. You parrot the algorithm, what the force is, what the powers that be want you to think, oh, yeah, you're actually parroting that and thinking you're in possession of the truth.

And anybody who sees it different, that they're under propaganda, it's a total mindfuck. And one of the things that happens in that circumstance is that the person so possessed becomes like a robot. They become like an automaton with no creativity, creativity programmed in. It's crazy to see. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
You mentioned this dreamlike nature of reality. In talking to you before this podcast, you talk about how you work with dreams. There's a dream that I'd like to share that was actually really important for me because there's one parts of these stories that I think oftentimes gets wrong. And a lot of these stories you think of, all of the vampire slayer stories, well, you just slay. You slay the vampires, you slay the people who are possessed, kill them.

Right. And that's just, that's a lot. It's a big theme in a lot of these stories. There's the other, right? And it's in human form, and you just kill the other in human form.

Paul Levy
Right. I had a dream, and in the dream, I was like a van Helsing type of character, and I had my allies, and we knew that there was a house that contained the coven of demons, right. And we had our kind of strategy. We were like high level navy Seal van Helsing demon slaying operatives strategy. We're gonna go in, and it's, the plan was, I talked to my people.

Aubrey Marcus
Plan was, I'm going straight through the front door. You guys take care of all the lesser demons. I'm going for the master demon, right? So, like, clear the way for me to get to the master demon. So we move in, and we have, we don't have guns.

We have swords and, you know, crossbows. And it was very much, you know, appropriate to the time that a lot of these stories are told, right? We burst through the door. My team moves into action. They start slaying these swarms of demons, and then I find the master demon, and I pull my sword, which was like a katana at this point.

I have an affinity for samurai, as you can probably tell over my right shoulder there. Totally. So I pull this, and I cut off the head of this master demon. Without that much of a fight, it was too easy. And I kind of had a sense of that in the dream.

Like, this was too easy because I knew that this force was incredibly strong, right? So then I take the head, and there was a hearth, there was a fire in the house, and I throw the head in the fire, but it's not burning. And I go, uh oh, this is not good. So it's a little gruesome, but I take my sword, and I stab it through each of its eyes, right? So I stab the sword through each of the eyes of the demon, but I knew that it wasn't actually still working, right?

So the demon reforms through the fire and becomes this large colored in these neon bright colors of just swirling, kaleidoscopic fire, almost. And I start to get dizzy and disoriented, and I start to lose my capacity to even stand, let alone fight this force. Some wisdom comes through my dream, and I drop my sword, and I just move in through the fire and through everything. And I embrace this demon. Oh, wow.

I embrace this demon, and I just pour as much love as I can, even though my skin is, like, melting from the fire, and I'm just, like, holding it. And then in a burst, there's this splash of water. And I'm lying on the ground next to this naked body of a man, and he just looks at me, and he goes, oh, my God. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

And I just start bawling, like, bawling, right? And I wake up, and I literally wake up actually crying from this dream. And to me, it's been such an important guiding principle for me, especially throughout the whole pandemic and everybody othering other people. Oh, you're the sheep, or you're the anti vaxxers, or you're this. And all of this othering that's going on.

It was a reminder, like, no, no. Underneath all of that is a beautiful human being that with the right application of love, they can reclaim the sovereignty of their higher self. Right. Oh, my God. That's an incredible dream.

It was an incredible dream. Oh, my God. And I don't have a lot of incredible dreams, so this one really, like, stood out to me. Right, right. No, I mean, wow.

Paul Levy
I'm, like, blown away. And it brings up a lot for me, because on the one hand, I know people. I have clients who are fighting demons, and they'll kill the demon, and then the demon will reappear in a new form, and they'll kill that one. And I try to point out, well, I think there's something a little bit off about your attitude. You might be actually possessed by the demon that you're trying to kill, and whatever, then the idea of.

Yeah, that inside of that demon was this human being who was imprisoned. And by having that embracing attitude, that welcoming attitude, and think about it in a dream, this is that part of yourself, and you're feeling this compassion and non separation for that part of yourself and that freedom. The human being that up until then, had been under the curse, under the spell. It's so trippy, because one way that I describe what's happening in our world right now is that we're under a collective spell, you know? And, wow, I appreciate.

Thank you for sharing that. Sure. Oh, my God. I think this doesn't mean that there isn't a place to fight, but the location of the fight is in the extra dimensional realms. Right.

Aubrey Marcus
The non embodied force of Witiko, or force of anti you. The non embodied force. This archonic force. Right. There's a place to fight that and resist it.

With all of your might, but when you conflate that with the human being that it is touching, right? That's when you're in a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's never just.

It's never just an embodied demon, at least as far as I understand. I'm not putting that out of the realm of possibility, that there's truly an embodied demon. I don't think so. But because I think there's always a child of God, there's always a human being underneath there, that it just has a parasite. Well, what if it's not an either or thing, but it's a both and thing?

Paul Levy
Because I think of my father and like an example, I'll tell you a dream now, and the dream you see, because what happened to me, I didn't know anything when this happened. I was in my early twenties when the abuse really happened.

And then I went so deeply inwards, like I said, I had some sort of this breakthrough breakdown process happen. And then I was in deep trouble, particularly once I got thrown into psychiatry. So let's. Let's go. Let's go slow a little bit.

Yeah. Tell me about this awakening process that happened that actually triggered the pathologizing of your condition, rather than mythologizing of this condition, which is certainly a better way. Well, there are so many experiences that were just so over the top, that were not just synchronistic, but were completely impossible, that my understanding was they couldnt happen in this world and yet they were happening. And particularly when I was around, I was beginning to meet my teachers. It was almost like there was a field that when I would enter that field, when I was with them, and I felt this incredible devotion and love, all of a sudden it was as if the three dimensional space time continuum would just shift and things would happen.

And to be honest, I can't talk about a lot of the experiences just because my inner guidance has said, no, no, no, understand, there are not to be publicly shared, but there's one that I openly talk about. And it was one of the first ones. And it was. I had just so I'd been sitting in meditation and it was all because I was in so much pain from the abuse, from my father, from the emotional abuse. And I was doing maybe about average 4 hours a day of meditation for a couple years and just getting more and more one pointed.

And then I got hit by a bolt of lightning just in my brain. It just not from outside. It went off in my brain.

And then within hours, I began having the recognition, oh my God, this is a collective dream. We're all co dreaming up into materialization each and every moment, this world. And I was 24, so I was so ecstatic about what I was realizing that that's what got me thrown in my first mental hospital. And what happened next, it changed my life and it saved my life. And this is what happened.

So I was in the San Francisco airport. My friend and I were going to fly up to Seattle to see a friend from college. And all of a sudden that's where I was having this revelation. And it was like I had a personality change overnight. And I was just over the top excited because there was no way I could have integrated what I was realizing.

It was such an overwhelming experience. And so the police got called and then I got put in an ambulance and I was driven to Highland Hospital in Oakland. It was right after dinner, it was nighttime to get put into my first psychiatric hospital. And they bring me in and they, you know, they bring me into the lounge where the patients had just had dinner. So they're lounging around and I'm in this completely exalted state, right?

And I see this woman as I enter into the lounge. And she's an older woman and she's blind. Her eyes are totally opaque. And I don't even think about what to do. I just see her.

And I walk right up to her. And it was like I was given a script and out of my mouth came the words, all you have to do to see is open your eyes and look. And I kept on reciting those words and kept on getting closer to her. The whole thing took not even a minute. And she regained her sight.

And then at that point, they took me and they strapped me up on a bed for the night. Now, just let me say I didn't sleep that night. I was totally tripping out over what just happened. And, you know, it was so obvious to me. Oh, my God, I'm having like an awakening.

And then the next morning, to complete the episode, they untie me and they put me in a room sitting at a table, and who's the only other person in the room but this ex blind woman? And shes not saying a word to me. She just is smiling ear to ear. And all of a sudden my heart just opens. My heart chakra just blossoms.

And then I understood. Oh, I get it. She was hysterically blind. And it was like she was inwardly not letting herself look. That was manifesting as her blindness.

And I somehow, in some way, clairvoyantly saw that. And it was like I was like I was just sent by central casting, I was like an Uber driver who was in that. And she just needed somebody to say these lines to help her to heal because I was just an open channel. I was so open to whatever needed to happen. And then she says to me, the only word she ever says to me, she goes, aren't you going to answer the phone call from?

And she says my father's name. And then within seconds the nurse comes in the room and says that my father's on the phone because my parents had just gotten word I had had a psychotic break. And so that's the one story that I've been inwardly given permission to talk about and I'm still unpacking. That was this revelation because I was just open for the healing that wanted to happen in the field. And I'm realizing more and more over the years that's all of us in potential.

When you're open, you can allow yourself to get dreamed up, to play whatever role that could actually help to facilitate the deeper healing that wants to happen. But one final comment on it, that experience saved my life because I was so, I mean I was 24, I was so young. And just imagine me trying to explain to the psychiatrist that what had just happened, and of course in their world, oh, that's just his hallucination, that's just his pathology. And I quickly figured that out that I should not really talk about what I was experiencing, but when you have an experience like that, it changes you. And I see, so that's what saved me for that next 18 months when all these doctors are saying, oh, you just have a mental illness and you're going to need to be on pharmaceuticals the rest of your life.

I'm just like, I'm diagnosing them, I'm thinking they're just idiots. And having had that experience and a lot of other experiences like that in that time, that saved me from buying in and subscribing to the psychiatric viewpoint. Yeah, this is, wow, thanks for sharing that story. I appreciate that. It reminds me actually also of another form of control of these either ecstatic or non consensus reality experiences.

Aubrey Marcus
You call it normopathy and I think you. Right, right. From somebody else. Yeah, yeah. My girlfriend when I was 1718 junior senior of high school at the time her name was Katie and Katie had clear extrasensory perception available and it came from her grandmother but she had a really fundamental christian household and so I mean this story she told, you know, was there was she was home alone with her mother and then, you know, she had just.

She was just. She was a kid, maybe eight or nine, and she was like, mama, we have to get out of the house. Mama, we have to get out of the house. Their dad was gone. Like, mama, we have to go.

We have to go. She was hysterical. Like, we have to go. Like, you know, like, bad men are coming. We have to go.

And mom's like, come on. It's okay, sweetie. I know you're scared. Just go to bed. Blah, blah, blah.

And someone that night broke into the house and stole a bunch of things and accosted her mother. And a whole horrific story that happened. And she'd had several. That was obviously the most dramatic and distinct, but several of those type of experiences. But in their framework, their kind of the way, the paradigm under which they saw the world, anything that would allow that possibility was demonic.

Paul Levy
Right? Even though it yielded this wildly positive, positive result and could have actually saved an enormous amount of trauma from the family. And, like, the receipts were in. Like, she was right. Just like the receipts were in with you.

Aubrey Marcus
You actually treated this blindness from this. She then decided and kind of bought into it. Not fully, but kind of bought into it a little bit. And I had a really unbelievable experience with her where she unlocked something within me in this kind of eye gazing practice that we did, that we didn't even plan to do. But she evoked some actual latent spiritual potential in myself, and I kept encouraging her to do that.

But the structure of that fundamentalist christian framework just didn't allow that gift to blossom. But in that more beautiful world, we would have a far more expanded understanding of what might be happening in the psyche. So instead of that, you getting taken to a psychiatric hospital, you'd be taken into someone who could sit down with some type of shaman or medicine. Right. In indigenous cultures, they would recognize.

Paul Levy
Oh, yeah. That this person might be being called. Yes. You know, like being called to be a shaman or a healer or a teacher or a creative person. Yeah.

You know, that's exactly right. Yeah. So then I want to tell you the dream, because I had to circle back. Sure. So then, you know, so the last hospitalization was in 1982.

And so it's been over 40 years. And then I was doubly traumatized because then there was the abuse from my father, then combined with the psychiatric abuse, and it was brutal. But all the while I was having this awakening. So I was going to therapy and connecting with my dreams and doing psychedelics and doing meditation and connecting with my teachers and shamanic stuff and just anything that would help because I was in such deep pain. And then I began having dreams, because what happens is that typically when you get in trouble, the psyche, it compensates a one sidedness.

So then it sends you, potentially, dreams that could show you what's going on or help you. And so night after night, like that dream you had shared, I was having night after night dreams like that, and I had no idea what to do with them, so I just began to learn. And then I would have dreams that I would recognize I was dreaming and just have these wild experiences. But there was one dream that really contextualized the situation with my father. And in the dream, I find Jung.

He has the collected works, and I have everything he's ever written, and I've read it a million times. But there's this collected work I find in the dream that I've never seen before, and I'm, like, astonished. And it's called the problem of the father. That's the title of the collected work. And so I open it up to a page, and there's one word on the page, and it's evil.

And it's like a William Blake sort of drawn calligraphy. And I touched a page, and the page comes out of the book, and I wake up, and I'm left holding that page. And so I wanted to share that just because here's my psyche sort of helping me to contextualize that it wasn't just like a personal situation with my father, but it was more an archetypal. It was like, yeah, I was encountering the archetype of the negative father. And, I mean, there were like million, not millions, but there was a lot of dreams like that that I could share.

And, yeah, I'm getting psychoactivated just thinking about it. Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. So let's zoom out a little bit cosmologically here, because one of the things that I've thought about is this force is universal, but it seems to have particular access through the human dimension. Right, right.

Aubrey Marcus
Because I'm imagining. So I'm imagining. And of course, my language that I'm, you know, using is the anti you. So it's a kind of a carbon copy of you, but in the negation. So as you polarize on one side, then there's the other pole, which is like the antithesis of you.

So let's say where there's a sun, there's a black hole, you know, the thing that casts light and the thing that sucks light. Right. And they're in balance. There's a balance to the cosmos, the Tao, the great Tao of all that is. So I get that that it's universal.

But then I think of, like, a dolphin, like, my friend kit has a dolphin named Dreamer. And we got to go swim with Dreamer in the water, in the wild out there. And I'm thinking, well, Dreamer is a pretty sentient dolphin. And I don't think Dreamer is really encountering. It's funny that the dolphin's name is Dreamer.

And that's what we're talking about, another one of these synchronicities. But I think about Dreamer, and I think, well, dream air probably isn't encountering this force, at least not in the same way that we do, if at all. Right? And I'm putting. I'd probably put my money on not at all.

So it seems to have something to do with the human being's capacity for self awareness and our ability to separate ourself from the collective field. Yeah. And so somehow that actually is the place that allows this mind virus to come. Well, what you just said, that's a way of, when I describe this mind virus, the Waitiko mindvirus, one way I describe it very simply is that it's identifying with the separate self. You know?

Paul Levy
And when you identify with the separate self, you then instantaneously create an other. Cause if you're separate, there's an other, and as soon as there's other, there's fear. Right, right. And fear is superfood for Waitiko. And then what you do, I mean, it's crazy what happens just from.

That's the one mistake.

That is the root. Yeah. That's the mistake that's at the root of all the illusions that come forth. So what happens? We then spend the rest of our lives, probably, in defending and protecting that separate self that doesn't even exist.

And all of our creative energy gets funneled into that black hole. Okay. Then something else we do. It's so crazy. And this is like having to do with the book I wrote about quantum physics.

Is that as soon as we either think. You see. How about if I just do a quick little sort of this thumbnail sketch of quantum physics? Because it's the medicine for Wetiko. And in essence, before quantum physics, physicists thought this world objectively existed.

And they were just passively trying to study the world to understand it. And then quantum physics comes into the world and into our minds. And it proves, empirically proves that there's no such thing as an objective world. That that's just an idea in our head with no correlate to reality. In other words, the act of observing the world actually influences the world that we're observing.

Okay, that's a description of a dream. Okay. But what that means is that the act of observation is creative when you go down that rabbit hole. But what I'm particularly wanting to point out is that our species is entranced in the materialistic point of view of thinking of ourselves as separate. And then the other half of that point of view is that the world then exists separate from us, objective.

So the more we identify with a separate self, the more the world will appear as objective, and or the more we view the world as objective, the more that reinforces our experience of existing as a separate self. Those are false ideas that mutually reinforce each other. And that's the illusion. That's the primary illusion. And when you see through that, then you take the foothold away from Waitiko, you know?

And so it's a rabbit hole that we're going down. Yeah, for sure. And it's the rabbit hole I want to go down. So this concept of, and I think, so let's go back to the dolphin dreamer. I've, in my medicine journeys, I've actually, I had one particular medicine journey that was incredibly potent.

Aubrey Marcus
And in this journey, I transformed into a triceratops. Oh, wow. And in the transformation into a triceratops. The most profound, and I've told this story before on the podcast, but the most profound element of this was not the horns and the plates and the scales and the hooves. It was that I could feel my heart connected to the mother, to the field of all matter, and to the father, to this force of life itself, in a way that I've never experienced in my human being.

So, yes, I understood that I was a separate self triceratops in this thing. But the connection to the field was so dramatic that actually, from that place, I think you become impervious. Like you said, it's the greatest defense against Wutiko is the connection to the field itself. And I imagine this dolphin dreamer just feeling the joy, connected to the ocean, Oshun and the great mother of the waters, and connected to the podcast and everything else that's a part of life itself, just connected to life. And so I really do think that we're on the right track and identifying this force, really having particular access and play the moment we actually lose the connection to the field.

Paul Levy
Right, right. That becomes the portal for which the darker force comes in. Because if you think about, like, here's whatico, and very simply, its identification with that separate self, and then weve disassociated from the fact that were interconnected with all of life, were interdependent with all of life. Because to tap into that interconnectedness, thats one way of describing the experience I had in that airport when I got brought to the ambulance by ambulance to the hospital, in that I was having the recognition, oh, my God, we're having a collective dream. We're all dream characters in each other's dreams.

And what is a dream character? It's an embodied reflection of that part of ourselves, which is to say we're not separate. And out of that realization, the energetic expression of that is compassion, is love. And that's like kryptonite to Waitiko. Yeah.

No, absolutely. And, you know, there's a thing I keep on thinking about where there are so many things. One is that there are some, and I was talking to you about this right before we went on today, there are some people who are spiritual people who, oh, I don't want to put my attention on the darkness, on evil, because that feeds it. And on one level, there's some truth to that. If you get overly fascinated with evil in Waitiko, then you're unwittingly feeding it.

But you see, the thing about Waitko, it's a form of being blind. I mean, think about that blind woman. But it's a peculiar form of blindness in that it's not aware that it's blind. And not only is it not aware it's blind, it actually conceives of itself as being sighted compared to people who actually have sight. It sees them as the blind person because it's just seeing its own projection.

Aubrey Marcus
Well, in a way, does it? I mean, I think it convinces you that you're not blind, and it convinces you to see other people. Right. So as the parasite moving through you. Right, right.

Because I think there is a way that it sees actually, like, at its highest archonic force, I think it actually sees what it's doing. Yeah, well, that's why I think about. Because I've noticed I have these circles, these groups, a whole community that's formed with reference to my work, both in Portland and around the world. And I've noticed that when I'll see, you see, if I think if I solidify somebody as, oh, they're just possessed by Huatico, well, wait a second, then who's the one who's possessed by Huatico? It's me.

Paul Levy
If I'm concretizing them, because we're all just fluid beings pulsating, pulsating in and out. Of the void every nanosecond. But there are points, though, where I'll notice, oh, I'm tracking the waitko in this person and the Waitko in them. It knows, it sees that I'm tracking it, and it'll take them away. It'll take them out of the group.

Aubrey Marcus
So it's really interesting you're othering them to some extent, which is, again, the lesson of that. For that dream that I shared, which is like, disambiguate the force that's acting through them from the human being, the child of God. Right. But yet, and the other, the opposite is also true. Is that.

Paul Levy
Yeah. If I'm tracking that at this moment, that there's some sort of, like, this spirit of just of deception coming through them. Yeah. I don't want to concretize them in that way, but I don't want to just turn the blind eye to that deceptive spirit. Right.

Aubrey Marcus
You don't want to lose my discretion. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to have that sharp sword of discernment, but not the sharp sword that wants to stab all the way through demon into the heart of your person. Then you've become possessed by the very evil force you're trying to.

Paul Levy
To destroy. It's such a trip. And so the thing is, one thing I point out, like I was saying, people who are really identified with all love and light and being spiritual, oh, I don't want to think about the darkness and all that. But I point out, if they're turning a blind eye to Waitko, then they're unwittingly feeding the darkness by doing that. That turning away is feeding the darkness.

And it's interesting, in Tibetan Buddhism, one of the greatest of the enlightened beings, he wrote the way of the Bodhisattva Shanti deva. And he, in that book talks about there's some sort of malevolent force in my mind that's numbing me and enacting sorcery on me and making me not able to be aware. What is that force? So here's like one of the greatest, even the enlightened beings in Tibetan Buddhism, whose basically main question is, we need to shed light on that anti you force. And do they call that forced Yama?

Aubrey Marcus
Is that Yama death? Yeah. But death has, it's not necessarily just. Life because that's a part of life I was never able to find, necessarily parse out them, giving it an actual name in Buddhism. In Buddhism, yeah.

Paul Levy
I would almost say like, mara, the evil one. But I point out in that. So here's Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree right before he becomes enlightened. And what's happening? The forces of Mara are, like, fucking with him and tormenting him and seducing him and distracting him and all these things.

And on the surface it seems like, wow, this is an evil entity. But yet I point out who is actually an incredible ally of Buddha, that he wouldn't have been able to become enlightened without this force was catalyzing him to develop the muscle to attain realization. Yeah. And that is ultimately the overarching, I think, message that's important in this fundamental principle, which is the darkness serves the light and the darkness serves the light, but the darkness only serves the light by actually you contesting and competing and allowing that to make you better. Like, Larry Bird served magic Johnson.

Oh, my God, I'm such a big Larry bird. Funny. Say that. Right? So he served, like, magic Johnson became more magic because of Larry Bird and Larry vice versa.

Right? Because they contested against each other. Because they allowed themselves to, like, you know, as iron sharpens iron, they actually allowed that to be the process of evolution. Right? And that's where, you know, for me, it's like that dojo.

Aubrey Marcus
Bow. Eyes forward. You know, I'd studied martial arts for many years, and the first thing that my sensei, Pat Johnson, taught me is like, no matter what, never take your eyes off the enemy. Even when you're bowing, you know, don't bow and look away like, this is your opponent. You never know what they're going to do.

Eyes forward, bow in gratitude and then give it your best. When you go to spar, give it your best. And then really, that's the way that I see it, is like, okay, like, thank you, and let's fucking go. I'm going to become better because of you. And that's where the gratitude comes from, right.

It doesn't mean that I'm going to take my foot off the gas because you will kick my ass. Yeah, yeah. Well, what you're saying, it's so cool because, like, to not take your eyes off of the opponent, that's to, like, you have to understand the nature your adversary. And that's what I'm trying to point. I'm trying to shed light on Miyamoto Musashi.

Know your enemy. Know his sword. Yeah, yeah. The greatest swordsman of all time is like, know your enemy. Know his sword.

Like, study that. And that's where, like, you know, I point out in my work that it's not just that light you know, it sheds light on the darkness, but light itself is revealed through the darkness. So here's Huatiko, right, which is the source of the greatest evil that our species enacts, both individually and collectively and hidden. Encoded. You see, it's a quantum phenomena, wotiko, and I'll just explain what I mean by that.

Paul Levy
Just like in quantum physics, they were trying to understand. Oh, here's light. What is the nature of light? Well, sometimes it manifests as a wave, sometimes as a particle. It's a function of how it's observed.

Okay, same thing with Huatico. It's the source of the greatest evil and simultaneously hidden, encoded holographically in the mind virus. It's the greatest force of evolution that's ever been known. And how it manifests, is it going to take us down or is it going to wake us up? It depends on us.

It depends if we have the recognition that it's revealing something to us that is essential for us to know. And if we don't recognize it, then we're fated to continually to compulsively just continue to destroy ourselves. Yeah, yeah. You write in undreaming with Tycho, and I shared this with you before, but you write that it's such an important force for our evolution that if it didn't exist, we would have to dream it up ourselves just so that we could properly evolve. This is a necessary part of the cosmos and the necessary action to take.

Aubrey Marcus
What do you do? Well, the necessary action to take is to allow this force to actually transform you into and draw you closer towards your self actualization. Like, would Yeshua have become the Christ if not for those encounters with Satan, right? Arguably not. Arguably not.

You may have been chilling, just eating olives and, you know. Right. No, totally, totally. And that's where, like, you know, I'm so glad you brought this up because here's this mind virus, this Waitko, this mind parasite, and it's actually helping us to really access our divine inheritance, our divine creativity. And there's one thing that I keep on thinking, so I'll share it.

Paul Levy
It's so profound, what Tycho is showing us. And one way to understand it is through the imagination, right? And just if we can imagine being in a dream, in a night dream, right? And if we're holding a perspective in a night dream, well, what is a night dream? But it's just a reflection of the mind.

So if I'm holding a perspective, what the night dream, what it does, it just instantaneously reflects back the perspective that I'm holding because it's not separate. It's just like I'm saying. It's just our own energy. And so then, for example, if I hold the perspective that this dream I'm in, this night dream, is objective. The whole night dream will shape shift.

And in that moment, give me all the evidence. Confirming the seeming truth. That the world I'm inhabiting. That is, that dream, is objective. Now, I have confirmation.

I have proof that my point of view is objectively true. So I become even more fixed in it, more entrenched in that viewpoint. So then I even see more that this world I'm in, which is a dream, is objective. And then it'll just give me all the evidence confirming that viewpoint. Ad infinitum.

It's a self reinforcing. It's a feedback loop in which what I'm describing. We've hypnotized ourselves, we've brainwashed ourselves. And that's the nature of our situation. That we all have this unbelievable, creative like genius.

To create our experience. And this is what quantum physics, when I say quantum physics. Is offering us the medicine for Waitco. We have this genius. We already possess the power that we need to heal what's happening in our world and in ourselves.

But we're not aware of it. And because of that, then this thing called Watiko. That doesn't even exist ultimately, because it's not separate from our own mind. You see, if people hear about there being a mind virus. And they get all scared and fearful.

No, no, no. Then that's food for Huatiko. But the idea is, you see, the actual huatiko, ultimately speaking, it doesn't even exist. And yet it can kill us. And it all has to do with if we actually consciously tune in to our creative genius in a way that serves us.

And if we don't do it, then it's like we've outsourced our own creative agency. And it gets turned against us in a way that's killing us. Yeah. You have a really cool part of this book on dreaming with Tico. Where you actually talk about polarization of sunglasses.

Aubrey Marcus
And how it actually spins the light in a certain way. So that it only allows things to filter through. And you can certainly see this happening in the collective. Where there's different sets of polarizing glasses. Which are all some form of psychic blindness.

Because it's only letting in a certain amount of light that comes through. So if you could explain that a little bit. To help people understand how we're filtering information into our psyche. To create this kind of confirmation biased phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Levy
And it's a way of really understanding, you know, how we are just participating in casting a spell on ourselves because there's no one else doing that. We're doing it to ourselves, you know? And so if I hold a viewpoint and say, for example, if I hold a viewpoint about what's happening in the world that the powers that be want me to hold, right? I mean, just that the thing which is mind blowing to me, I will mention that to people who I feel have ingested the propaganda and are under the spell. And I go, isn't it interesting that you're holding a point of view that the powers that be that are sort of like the darker powers want you to hold, and they're not even interested about it.

They're not even curious about, gee, I wonder if I should look at that. And so when we take in, it's like we've outsourced our own sense making and meaning making and authority and, oh, whether it's the mainstream media or whoever, and we just take in what somebody else is telling us is true. And then as soon as we see the world that way, being like a dream, then we will attract all the evidence confirming that viewpoint as being objectively true. And the more then we install that viewpoint online in our mind as being objectively true in a feedback loop, the more evidence we will attract confirming that. And we're just convinced we're in possession of the truth without realizing, no, we've actually hypnotized and brainwashed and propagandized ourselves.

And when a person's in that situation, there's no talking to them. You can't, whether it's evidence or facts or logic, whatever, it's like they're taken over by something. An example of when somebody, people hear about the idea of a mind virus and they'll say to me, well, what evidence do you have? Or that sounds really. That's gobbledygook or whatever.

I mean, it's crazy to me. And I'll say, okay, well, what about people who have an addiction? And we all have our addictions, whether it's to our process or to a sense of self or whatever. And if you think about an addiction or another example. Cause it's so similar to addiction is like being in trauma.

And I've been screaming for years, I'm totally in trauma. And we all are, where our species is in trauma. And the thing which is interesting about trauma is that when you have trauma, the way you try to heal from the trauma creates the very trauma you're trying to heal from in once again, that infinitely self reinforcing feedback loop. But what I point out so that, you know, I'll bring up, like, addiction trauma, there's a zillion, I mean, just, you know, all over the world that are showing. You see, the thing about a mind virus, what it essentially means is that the origin of our collective madness is to be found within the psyche.

And where else could it be found? It's a no brainer, you know, and. But the thing. A brainer, right? Totally.

The thing about. About trauma is that encoded, you see, what is the pathology of trauma? It's the compulsion to repeat. We become traumatized one moment in historical time, then that ends. The perpetrator or whatever just exits stage left, and we then internalize the trauma, and we then start doing it to ourselves.

That's the pathology of trauma. Right. And yet encoded in that pathology, we're actually trying. You see? Okay, let me say one thing about the definition of trauma.

One of the most beautiful definitions is unexperienced experience. It's like we had an experience, and because it was traumatic, by definition, it was overwhelming. So we couldn't integrate it, we couldn't symbolically express it. So then a part of us disassociates, splits, and that develops. In psychology, they call autonomous complexes like these split off parts of the psyche that develop a seeming life or will of its own.

That's what he indigenous people call that, a demon. Okay, but the point is encoded in that, enact that recreation of the trauma again and again that we're doing to ourselves. We're trying to consciously experience something. So the point is, is that holographically encoded in the pathology is the medicine. That's Huatico.

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah. To circle back to a previous point, which I think is really important, is there's the indigenous cultures, many of them, and they had some superstitious beliefs. And you can actually say that every indigenous culture had the right beliefs and they were doing all the right things. I mean, there is human sacrifice, and there was all kinds of crazy shit that was going on that was probably with Tycho acting at that point in time as well, and they weren't able to name it. But I was recently reading Tyson Junca Porta's book sand talk, and he talks about the First nations people of Australia and their beliefs.

And he really identifies this as similar to what you were talking about as the Me disease, this malignant egophrenia, and this kind of narcissism that leads to the colonialization and all of the treatment that's happened to pretty much every indigenous culture around the world when they've encountered those forces of empire. And he so strongly correlates that and they have their own names for it, etcetera. But even in his own narration of his book, he's working to change the coding of his language so that the language has clean coding and can point him towards actually clarity and protection against these forces by calling himself us two. So he doesn't say I. Oh, wow.

He says, us too. So us two went to the. Went out in the bush. Because he's collapsing that separation of the I and they, right. And saying like, yeah, all right, my name's Tyson.

I get it. But also it's us too, because I'm always connected. And so he codes that in his own language, right? And I think one of the challenges that we're facing is that our whole system is coded with buggy code, right? It's coded with Witiko's code to separate ourselves even further from other people.

Paul Levy
Right? That's so right on. Because it's the power of the word. First was the word, and the word was with God. And that whole thing that the word that we're not just describing the world with our language.

We're actually participating in creating it. And particularly in English, we have. There's the noun and a verb, and they're separate and unconsciously encoded in the semantic code, in our syntax, in our language is creating a subject and object. And in that gap between the subject and object. I mean, that's what I point out in my quantum physics book is like, all the problems of humanity get acted out.

And I'm not the only person. I'm just a translator. I mean, even the idea of this isn't anything new. I'm just a translator trying to translate indigenous wisdom and an example in the Bible or in the apocryphal text, they talk about huatiko. But interestingly, it got edited out of the Bible because I point out that Wotiko was on the editorial board.

But no, seriously. But in the apocryphal deck, they talk about the counterfeiting spirit, right? And that's waitko. Because Wotiko is a counterfeiting spirit that puts us on, right? It impersonates us.

It tricks us. It fools us. It offers us this false version of ourselves. Oh, I'm traumatized. I'm wounded.

I'm limited. And if we're not in touch with ourselves at that moment and we identify with its version of ourselves, then it has us. Then it can manipulate and control us. You know? And if you think about what I'm pointing at.

So, you see, the thing about we, Tico, it has no power to steal our soul, but it tricks us into. Giving to believe that it can. Yeah, exactly. It tricks us into giving our soul away. And then we identify with who we're not, and then we forget our creative agency.

That's a recipe for madness. What Heco is a collective psychosis. It's the diagnosis for what our species is suffering from. Yeah. On the personal level, one of the things that I found particularly helpful.

Aubrey Marcus
So I've had the blessing to be able to be friends with and also study the works of a channel named Paul Selig. And I don't know if you're familiar with his work. Oh, I am. Yeah. So one of the primary affirmations that his guides that come through share is, I know who I am.

In truth, I know what I am. In truth, I know how I serve. In truth, I am here. I am here. I am here.

I have come as love. I am love. And it is a mantra. There is something particularly powerful about that when I feel the forces of Witiko acting on me, because even though I have this level of awareness, I'm not immune. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not immune. I mean, I'll still hear some voice like, you're a failure. You should just fucking kill yourself. I'll hear that. Where the fuck is that coming from?

And if I'm not careful, I'll think that's me. Right, exactly. And I'll think it's me. Exactly. And then I'll have to go back and be like, nope, that's not.

That's not the real me. Right. You know, and then, so I'll go into that affirmation, right, and I'll claim, you know, my own name. I have my own kind of sacred name that I'll claim. So just like you can name the demon to give yourself power, you can name yourself.

And I have this whole structure for building your own sacred name. So you claim your own sacred name, connected all the way up the channel, all the way to God. Claim that from the monad to the actual divine, all that is, from the Atman to the Brahman, and all the different stages of your name, claim your sacred name, and then move into that mantra that the guide said. And it's actually one of the more powerful moves that I've experienced, because it dispels the illusion of that you are this other thing, this mind virus. It's like, no, you claim who you really are, right?

Paul Levy
Oh, man, that is so right on. It brings up a memory. So when I got out of that last hospital in 82, like I said, I was deeply in trauma. And then I found two of my teachers, these incredible tibetan lamas who were back. They were living in the city that I was living right outside of.

So I would see them all the time for years, and they were just so kind, and they never turned me away.

And I was going to them. And basically what I was describing every time was just this incredible torment. Like, there were these darker forces and these demons from my abuse and my father and the trauma. And that's all I would ever tell them, you know, and they would give me practices to do. And I was fortunate that I did the practices.

But then, like, one day they said something, and I'll never forget it. They said, paul, it's because you have such potential for light that the demons are even interested. And I heard that. I really heard that. And I realized, oh, that's not just me.

That's the way it works. So, you know, when I write my books, you know, in the morning is when I write. And every morning as I sit down to write, I feel these incredible demonic forces trying to stop me. And I've learned to feel so happy going, oh, my God, I'm on the right path. Great.

Instead of interpreting it like, oh, wow, I'm really screwed up, and blah, blah, blah. And that's really, really helped me. Yeah. In my concept of anti you, I use this as well, because as you evolve, so does this force evolve with you? Because it has to, right?

Aubrey Marcus
Like, if you get better, your competition has to get better in order for you to continue to get better, right? Like, if only magic Johnson got better, but Larry Bird didn't get better, right, then no longer would larry Bird be that epic, you know, competitor that would drive them to continued evolution and become their best. But it's this carbon copy of you. So sometimes when this wutiko or anti you force is really strong, I've learned to just smile and say, wow, wow, you're ingenious and you're really powerful. But you know what that means?

That means that I am equally as ingenious and powerful. And I, through my creative agency, have the ability to evolve, to become even more powerful. It's always like a lagging step behind because only we have the power to evolve. It doesn't have the power to evolve. It's a copy of us wherever we are in our static counterfeiting spirit.

Paul Levy
Right. It counterfeits where we're at, but then as soon as we evolve, we're better than it, and then it'll counterfeit our next level, and then we'll evolve more, and it'll counterfeit our next level. And this is the process. Totally. Right.

It's so cool hearing you articulate stuff that, you know, just in a slightly different way than I think about it. That's so right on, you know, because the thing about Waitiko, it's the counterfeiting spirit. It's an impersonator, but it has no creativity on its own. Yes. So it plugs in.

That's why I keep on talking about that. The antidote, the medicine for Waitiko is to tap into our creative nature, because if we don't tap into it, then it will access our creative nature and turn it against ourselves. Now, one thing that I want to, because it's such an unbelievably profound idea. It's like in his collective works, Jung talks about in times of collective psychosis, only a new symbolic idea will save humanity. And that's exactly what Wotiko is.

And so one of the things to understand about Waitco, it's so trippy. It's like doing a psychedelic in that it's an inner disease of the soul that has a magical ability to somehow express itself via the medium of the outside world. Okay, and so what that means, I'll explain. So, say when wotiko gets into a particular brain or mind, what does it do? It colonizes the psyche.

It hijacks the executive function of the psyche. It sets up a shadow government. It dictates to the ego. It takes over the regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor it. The deep state of our own psyche.

Yeah, exactly. And all the while, the person has no idea that they're actually incarnating and being an outpost for the darker forces. Right. Oftentimes think they're, like, righteous and on the side of light. And think about what I just described.

That's an inner process. And think about what's happening in the world with the deep state, with the shadow government, with the taking over of the regulatory agencies, the taking over of the executive function. I mean, it's exactly what's happening. How totalitarian forces are taking over the world. And interestingly, in his work, Jung talks about Waitiko all throughout his collective work.

He doesn't have the name for it. He calls it a number of different names. The one name, because I know his work so well, he calls it totalitarian psychosis, because it's a psychosis. And think about what's happening in our world that's playing out. But the point is, when you see what's playing out in the world and you recognize and you translate it into, oh, that's just reflecting symbolically what's playing out in my mind.

Oh, my God. The outer and the inner are reflections of each other. Oh, my God. That's just like a dream. Guess what?

Then you're waking up. And then the very playing out of Huatico is helping you to expand your awareness and to wake up. Do you know, when you look at what's happening, do you feel like there is? I know I have a sense that this contest is very real. And sometimes I have this kind of deep faith that we will prevail.

Aubrey Marcus
Like, we just will. No matter how dark it gets, no matter how much these forces align, something will be inspired within us and we will overcome. But then I imagine that there are potentially. Have you seen the Dune series or read the dune novels at all? No, but I'm familiar.

Paul Levy
I mean, I haven't seen the new, but I'm familiar with them. Yeah. Okay, so there's like a race of a planet and a race of beings called the Harkonnens. And they are the embodiment of what it would look like if this totalitarian disease kind of took over. And it's all violence and sadism and no actual erosion.

Aubrey Marcus
All counterfeit airhouse, all counter, all nothing is. All life has been kind of sapped out of it. And it's just pure power. And it's just the pleasure of destruction and power. And there's no heart in this.

And it does seem possible that there is an evolution and a momentum, a kind of flywheel effect where actually Witiko does gain agency of an entire population. And then I think, okay, if that's possible, then we really are in this moment of like a Ragnarok moment, tipping point, a war of the gods, a war of ideas. Which way are we going to go? Are we going to move towards this Harkonnen lifeless destruction of all of life, power, sadism, control, all of this moving on? Or are we going to move into like, the original, you know, atreides kind of feeling of like the good father with the sense of justice and love and value and coding.

And I go back and forth between the deep faith that, oh, yeah, no matter how ugly it gets, we're going to prevail. But there's also some part of me that says, and fuck, maybe we won't. And it's a little bit of a paradise. That's a great. I love that question.

Paul Levy
And I really, as much as I'm able every day, I do a deep dive into what's going on in the world because I see it. This is the dreaming. And, like, you know. And it feels really important for me to have open eyes and understand. And there are two things I want to say.

On the one hand, there's a subjective feeling I have that, oh, we've been here before. This is it's like having a dream that's a recurring dream. And here we're on the verge of enlightenment, collectively speaking or individually. And it's really through the individual that the collective really starts to happen. Or are we just going to blow ourselves up?

And when I feel into the recurring dream feeling, it feels like, oh, we've been here a million times before. And we've blown ourselves up. And then in a dream, there's no time. So whether it's 14 billion years takes a second. And then here we are back again.

And are we gonna do it again and blow ourselves up? Or is this the time that we're gonna wake up and recognize that? Waitiko. It's a revelation. And enough of us actually awaken, and we can connect with each other, and we can dream a different dream based on love and compassion.

That's one thing that comes up. The second thing is quantum physics. Because quantum physics, it talks about. So quantum physicists were trying to understand. What's the microstructure of this physical world?

What are the building blocks? And as they went down and down in scale, they found that at the fundamental foundation of this universe was not matter, but was consciousness. And they so they would, you know, they conceived of it as being like an elementary particle. And these elementary quantum particles, they existed in every possible potentiality they ever could exist. Up until the moment we observe it.

And then the moment we observe that elementary particle, it actualizes into one form. All the other potentialities vaporize into the parallel worlds. And then the next moment comes, and it happens again and again. How come? I share this is because quantum physics is pointing out.

That even if one of those potentialities is ridiculously, highly unlikely. And that's pretty much a quote from one of the founding fathers. It could manifest this very next moment. And just to bring that to the real world. So the fact that humanity could sufficiently awaken and actually avert the catastrophe.

That we're actually all co creating together. Quantum physics says, oh, that's completely within the realm of the possible. And if you're not thinking that, then what the hell are you thinking, right? You know? Yeah, I think it's actually our.

Aubrey Marcus
It's a responsibility for us to. To maintain that faith and to maintain that belief, because the belief in the observation of that reality being a real timeline, that's what collapses. Exactly. That's what collapses. That attracts it into manifestation.

It collapses the future into the present. You know, you have a future memory. You can call that hope. Hope is a future memory. You could call that hope and say, but no, when you really concretize it, like Joe Dispenza's work, like, concretize it, bring that into your emotional body and know that that's real, that actually is the force that were actually needed to actually bring that closer to us.

So it is like a devotional act to maintain that faith that this time, even if we've been here, this is our 13th time or whatever, however many times it is, this time, we're going to make it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's absolutely right. And when you contemplate it atemporally outside of time, that universe where we've already awakened, it's already happened. And by putting our focus on that, it's like having a dream, and you're like bringing the dream into incarnation.

Paul Levy
And that's pointing at that incredible creative agency that we have. And what I'm particularly interested in is like, yeah, it's like, one thing. If one person has this realization, it'll improve their life in so many ways. But what's really interesting to me is when a number of people have this realization and come together. And one way to really conceive of this is through the imagination.

Say we're having a dream, and then, oh, all of a sudden, I have the recognition that I'm dreaming. Oh, wow. I have this lucidity, and then imagine other dream characters. They also have, and they're just parts of me, but they also have this realization that they're dreaming. And we all come together and we trip out on, what are we realizing?

Oh, my God. This universe is manifesting the way it is because we've been programmed in conditions to dream it out of this point of view of fear and separation. But yet we can easily discover, at least, like, imagine that we can get in phase with each other. And it's what I call the sacred, our sacred power of dreaming, that we could get in phase with each other and dream ourselves awake. And that's what's available to us.

That's what's being offered to us. It's us to consciously step in in a participatory way with our own evolution. And that's what all of this is about. Yeah, there's a couple things that I like to look at optimistically. And one of these things, of course, again, as I've shared 25 years on the psychedelic medicine path and worked with the many great lineages, from the bwiti to the Quechua, to the Shipibo, to all the great lineages, to the chaveen heritage of my teachers, teacher Don Howard, and also through that crucible, developed my own kind of my own dendrites of a lineage, of my own ability to serve a particular type of medicine and with all humility to the sacredness of this field that I'm entering.

Aubrey Marcus
So this renaissance of these entheogenic and psychedelic medicines and clairogenic medicines is one thing that gives me great hope, because it seems to awaken the light that dispels the shadows and the illusions. So I think of that, and then I also think of the psychedelic nature of a story and how important stories are in shaping our reality. And people are looking at the kind of gloomy horizons of artificial intelligence. But one thing I think they're under indexing, and the importance is because it's going to be the democratization of the ability to tell stories. Right now, stories are still controlled largely by the forces of empire, whether it's a publishing house or whether it's a movie studio.

And that's not to say that there aren't beautiful stories that emerge. Of course there are, and that they make it through the gatekeepers and they. But now, I think those of us who have contact with what that more beautiful reality could be, that we're drawing in, we're going to be able to make our own Pixar films, like within, like five years or something crazy. We can write a script or create our own graphic novels without. And blessings to all of the artists who've been able to do this before, and I want them to continue to be able to put their wet ink on a sheet.

And I think there's incredible value to that, but also the ability to tell these stories and not have to raise $100 million to make a film and not have to, like, go through all of this, it could be a really kind of underappreciated revolution that's coming, that we can have these stories that are starting to be generated. It's an example that holographically hidden and encoded in AI. It's both the most incredible instrument that would serve our species or destroy our species. Both are there in potential, depending on what we do with it. And it's funny you mention the story thing, because in a way, we all are, five years from now, creating our own story, our own film, as in and through our life.

Paul Levy
And the interesting thing about stories, that's the shaman. They're the storyteller. The shaman is the creative artist and the storyteller. And I think in that book, the undreaming Waitiko, I think it's the biggest. It's the biggest chapter is about shamanism.

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah. Unbelievable chapter. Well, thank you. And, you know, I mean, it just came out of my own experience because one way of describing what happened to me in my confrontation with evil is that, unbeknownst to me, I got enlisted into this shamanic initiatory process. You know, when I was a young kid, I knew nothing about shamanism.

Paul Levy
But the thing, which is interesting, it was right before the pandemic happened, right before the lockdown. That's when I wrote that chapter about shamanism. And I point out that we, as a species, we are descending into the depths of the darkness of the unconscious. We're going through this death, rebirth experience, our species. And the point is that we are all called to potentially be shamans.

And a shaman, once again, is the creative artist and what the Toltecs would. Call the Nagwal, the artist of your life. Right, right. No, totally. And, you know, and the funny thing, not that it's funny, it's actually the opposite of funny, but the main sort of content of when I talk about the abuse from my father was when I was in college and I was studying, like, economics and math, and I was on my way to be to do that.

And then I realized, oh, my God, I'm an artist. And that's what I wanted to do. And my father did everything he could to obliterate that creative impulse in me. And what he didn't realize was that it just made it stronger. But that's in essence, when I say my abuse from my father, that was really it.

And the shaman, it's such an important because, like I'm saying, we're all being called to be shamans, and the shaman is related to the healer who has a wound to the archetype of the wounded healer. And for years I didn't know how to describe myself. And then I found out about the wounded healer because I'm so in touch with this incredible wound that I've been carrying. And for so many years, I was committed to oh, I'm going to get rid of this wound and heal it. And then at a certain point, I began to have the realization, what if it never goes away?

And all of a sudden, now, for years now, I've been able to carry the wound where it becomes a portal to the creative gifts that come through me, where I just become the instrument. That's the archetype of the wounded healer. That's the archetype of the shaman. Yeah. It reminds me of an experience I had in a medicine journey where I actually, now that I think of it, I actually don't even know if there was any medicine on board.

Aubrey Marcus
It might have just been a deep meditation. Sometimes things happen in journeys, dreams, meditations. And in this one, I can't remember any particularly strong medicine that I was on. I remember where I was in my house, and it's the place that I meditate and also the place that I journey. So sometimes it gets a little bit jumbled in my mind if there was medicine on board or not.

But I felt the presence of, you know, of Yeshua, of the christs, right, in this journey. And just without. Even. Without even any thought about it, I just started to share all of my wounds and all of my woes and all of my failings and all of my shortcomings. And it just kind of.

It evoked that. It wasn't like I was like, oh, I'm going to confess, but it just, like, poured out of me. And this figure that was either in my mind or beyond my mind, I think it's all very similar as it goes down, but this figure of Yeshua just listened lovingly to every word. And then all he said was, me, too, right? And I was like, oh, man, right?

The most powerful thing he could possibly say, which is not that, oh, well, here I am, the Christ, the perfected being, and all of this stuff that's below me and that's beneath me, and you need to go repent, fucking wash yourself with holy water, go do some more spiritual push ups, whatever you need. It was like, yeah, me too. From there, that allowed the most massive cathartic healing to arise within me, because it was like, oh, wow, that's the great gift of having been wounded and also overcome them, is you can share, like, yeah, me too. Maybe not specifically, exactly the same way. Maybe not.

Paul Levy
But from the archetypal dimension, definitely. And the image in the paintings of the Christ who's in the body of glory, the resurrected body, there's always the wound, and there it is, symbolized.

And Christ was because just talking about the mind virus, Waitiko, the psychological mechanism that underlies it is projecting the shadow. And think about who was the archetypal, the scapegoat. It was Christ. He's the lamb of God. And if I could just thought of it, this projecting of the shadow in his work, Jung, he defines shadow projecting as the lie.

Now, who's the liar but the devil? Right? And it's such an interesting father of lies. Father of lies, right? Great father process.

There you go. But it's so interesting when you really shed light on the dynamic of projecting the shadow, because, say, if I'm not in touch with my own darkness and I want to exterminate my own darkness, I don't want to own it or look at it. That's an inner process. So if you remember, Waitiko is an inner process that plays itself out in the outer world. So then if I'm not connecting and not not awake to my own darkness, think about it in a dream.

Then I project out that shadow out there. It makes me think. In his work, Jung says everything. We're unconscious. It approaches us from outside.

We project it out. So then if I'm not in touch with my darkness, I project it outside. It gets dreamed up in the dream. Somebody will come into the dream, either waking or night dreaming, and will embody my darkness, right? And now I see I have somebody carrying my own shadow.

So now I become even more entranced with my viewpoint that the evil is outside of myself. And when you amplify that, then what do you do? You try to destroy the person who's the carrier of the shadow. And what is that? That's just an externalization of the very inner process of trying to destroy your own shadow.

So here your inner process is playing out outside in the outer world. And by doing that, but you've become possessed by the very evil that you're trying to destroy. That's a psychological, that's the way of understanding from the psychological point of view, how Waitiko works. One of the things that I think for me has been important as well, is shame plays a huge role in creating blindness. Oh, God.

Aubrey Marcus
That which we're ashamed of. We look away. We look away from that which we're ashamed of. We also look away from our true power because we're ashamed that we're not actually living within our true power. So shame plays on both sides.

It likes we look away from those elements that we feel are unsavory or bad. And then we look away from our power because we're ashamed that we're not there in that power, and we don't want to take responsibility. But shame is this blanket of. It's this blanket of delusion that comes over us. It is like an agent of Witiko.

Paul Levy
Totally. And not just shame, but with guilt. Because if I'm projecting the shadow like my father, that was a way of just very succinctly just describing what he played out with me. He had his own darkness or his own shadow or his own self hatred, and he just projected it on me. And as the kid, you just kind of are permeable, and you take it in, and then when you think about it, oh, and in his unconscious, he was unconsciously feeling guilt around projecting the shadow out there.

So then what does that mean? Well, that means he's going to do it even more to get rid of the feeling of guilt. And that becomes the feedback loop. Yeah. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
So in this, I think one of the big challenges is that we're ashamed of parts of us that we shouldn't be ashamed of, which is our animality. So the shame around our own animality. And the church has played a very significant role in this, particularly as it pertains to our sexuality. Right, right. Like, we are highly sexualized beings.

Our grossest animal relative is the bona bow, and they resolve conflict by all forms of sex. Like, we are sexual beings. And so the church placing particularly these puritanical value structures of the guilt and shame around our sexuality, and then we're also. We're also competitors. There's a pleasure in the competition and domination of our rivals that's within us.

And I call that, like, the beast. It's the animal that's in there, and it's in everybody. It's in everybody. And it feels good, actually. And that's the thing.

And that's the thing I think people are really ashamed of, is like, yeah, it feels good. But if you don't actually acknowledge that there's a beast within you that actually enjoys domination and enjoys sexuality in its full expression, then the shame will create the shadow expressions of domination that'll play out in the really toxic ways or shadow expressions of sexuality, which will play out in toxic ways. But if you really are able to look and be at peace with the animal inside you, your own inner dragon, your own inner beast, then you become like, okay, I see you. And then now I control you and channel you into the ways that are actually healthy. Channel it into ways that, like, for me, I channel it out in the basketball court.

Oh, well, so I'll go or in the dojo or in kendo or in something where I'm a fucking savage out there. Right. But when the game's up, you know, I don't only want to beat somebody. I want to take them apart. Like, I want to beat them so bad and just smile with glee.

But at the end, it's hugs and sandwiches and a beer, like, how's your life? How are you and your girl? You know, like. And it actually brings me closer. But I give my beast a place, an arena to play where I'm not ashamed of it, so it doesn't have to come out in shadow forms where I'm trying to be abusive to my employees or something.

Paul Levy
Yeah. Because those shadow forms, one way of describing that is that then if you don't have a conscious sort of, if you're not having a relationship consciously with that beast or animal or dragon or whatever you call it, it will possess you beneath your awareness, and it will act itself out in a destructive way. That's what you're pointing at. Yeah. And this is like, the path of the dragon Rider is to be like, okay, I've actually seen the beast within myself.

Aubrey Marcus
And this idea of slaying the dragon, I think we get this wrong. We get it in biblical terms in Saint George, right? Slay the dragon and you're. No, no, no. The slay the dragon is to know that the dragon lives within you, and that's part of your power.

So in the tibetan buddhist model, like, some of the Tonkas that they would worship. Oh, totally. All these. Yamantaka. Yeah, yeah.

Yamantaka. Death destroyer, fully hard cop. Right. You know, like this wild being, but also carries the spiritual dimensions above it. And they channel the fury of that into their actual spiritual power.

Paul Levy
Right. And the essence of those deities is compassion. And that's what sits on top. That's what sits at the highest hierarchy. If you look at a tonka of yamantaka, it's the wrathful to the semi, wrathful to the enlightened.

Aubrey Marcus
It's a stack of three beings that's there. And so there's a place for all of it. But it's like the integrated self that doesn't put exile on part of us. That's a beast. And that's why when I met these lamas, who were genuinely, they were lineage holders, I just can't say enough about them.

Paul Levy
And here I was in this completely over the top, traumatized state, having just gotten out of these mental hospitals and then still dealing with my father, abuse, just being around them, where they were so congruent and just so embodying the teachings. It wasn't just like they were incredible teachers saying the words. No, they were embodying that love and compassion and that just being completely at ease with themselves and owning all those parts of themselves. And one, I remember I would bring them to Portland every year and host them and set up teachings. And one year they gave some sort of, I forget what empowerment it was.

But in the questions and answers afterwards, or was it teaching? Somebody asked them, what about your practice of tantra? And they began laughing, and they said, oh, it's a great practice. And it's very much that. Yeah, I think that's one of these areas.

Aubrey Marcus
One of the ways that we're seeing this shadow play out is these wild abuses in sexual abuses that are playing out all over the place. And it comes from the shame, and it comes from the shadow, and it comes from the looking away, the turning of the face from the divine, which is really looking at yourself as connected to whoever you're with. Not separate then. So that if you abuse someone, you're really abusing yourself. That's looking panim al panim face to face with the divine.

But if you look away, then that beast comes. Comes out and uncontrolled, will create all kinds of havoc towards others, which then actually. Then creates more shame in yourself. Totally. And upgrades your own possibility.

Paul Levy
Right, right. No, totally. And, you know, a thing that I keep on thinking about, so I'll bring it up, going back to the shaman and the wounded healer. And when I was saying that we're all shamans and because if you think about it, so we've all been traumatized and oh, yeah. And just to bring up about that, I can't say enough about the work of.

Because I study the work of jung. I mean, he's my main man that I've just studied just for 40 plus years. And he talks about what people like. The problem, the great problem of our day is people don't understand what's happening. And what's happening is that we're having an encounter with the darkness of the soul, with the darkness of the unconscious.

And he also says the great sickness that our species is suffering from is a sickness of being dissociated. And that just maps on fully to what I see in the world and what I see in myself. And so think about the shamanic archetype. We get traumatized and we split. We dissociate.

That's, by definition, we can't integrate it. So it's overwhelming. So a part of us dissociates, and if we don't integrate it, then that develops an autonomy, the autonomous complex, the demon Waitiko, and that constellates. At a certain point, we go in search of that disassociated part of ourselves. That's the shamanic journey.

Okay. And the thing about a shaman, it's not something anybody in their right mind consciously would choose to do. They'd have to be insane because the suffering is so overwhelming. But it's something they're called that you're typically called to do. And typically, when somebody's called, when I talk about this in that chapter, is that so often, if not always, it'll look like theyre going crazy.

Like from the outside, all of my friends, when I had my experience in 1981, I mean, im not friends with them anymore because they just solidified me as all Pauls in denial of his mental illness. And so from the outside, itll look like the person being called is going crazy, is having a psychotic break. And it makes me think maybe so many of the people who have identified with psychiatric illnesses or are locked up in baptism words, potentially are shamans who are called who maybe theyve had the failed initiation and havent really accomplished it. But the idea is, at a certain point, the shaman goes in search of themselves, of the disassociated part of themselves, in such a way that they bring back their members. They remember putting back the disassociated parts of themselves.

And the thing, which is cool, like, when I learned this word, there's a word not amnesia. Like, when we forget, it's an amnesia. It's an unforgetting. And what we unforget, it's not a historical thing in time. It's something atemporal.

It's something eternal. It's who we are. And that's when we really start to individuate. And what I'm describing is a personal process that each one of us are experiencing. And collectively, because if you think about collectively, were all fragmented and disassociated.

And seeing ourselves as separate and against each other, thats reflecting whats happening in a psyche thats overridden with Huitiko. You see? So right there again, is that opportunity to recognize whats playing out on the outside world is reflecting whats happening in our mind. And when you see that, you see the dreamlike nature. Seeing the dreamlike nature, thats when youre on the way to dispelling Waitiko.

I guess one of one final thing about the dreamlike nature, which is really interesting to me because I've had so many people say to me, oh, I have these dreams where I awaken in the dream, I'm having a lucid dream, and then I control the whole dream. And that, to me, tells me that they're not having a lucid dream. Because if you're having a lucid dream, why in the world would you control it? Who's that? You.

Who's controlling it? What you are controlling is yourself.

Aubrey Marcus
When you bring up this concept of an amnesia, it kind of evokes in me this understanding that we're continually, at least I am. I'll just use the first person here. We're toggling between an amnesia and amnesia, selective amnesia of remembering and forgetting. And I've had these experiences of an amnesia, like really like the clarity. And a lot of these have come from the medicine journeys, but not solely right, from these, like, so for example, a bufo journey, a five meo DMT journey, which I don't know if you've ever experienced it a lot.

Yeah. So that is to me, like the quintessential anamnesiastic experience, right? You encounter the divine, call it love, call it whatever, call it God, call it whatever you want, and there is no doubt in your mind that you've just experienced God or love or whatever, whatever word is comfortable for you, but you have a knowing, you just know it, and it resets the landscape. But surprisingly, I'll go back into a five meo bufo journey thinking that I remember, and I'll go back into it and I'll go, oh my God, I forgot. I forgot again, right?

Somehow there's been a little bit of amnesia. I couldn't even hold the truth of it. Right, well, that what you're saying is really important because how I think of that, because I have all these groups and I see this play out in the groups with people, but I see it play out in myself. And an example being like, I'll use myself as an example, say my unconscious will be activated, my complex is constellated, I play something out unconsciously. And then now if I stay stuck in that state, that's a problem.

Paul Levy
But then at a certain point I pop out of the state and then I contemplate on what I just played out and I get the teachings from it. It's like, oh, wow. So here at one point, I just was experiencing the complex from inside. It was an inside job. I was, in a subjective way, experiencing what it was like to be unconscious and act out unconsciously.

And then the next moment, I'm actually contemplating it objectively, like it's outside of myself and seeing what I can learn. And then when I get the learning, what happens? I jump in and do it again. I play out the next part of my unconscious, and I point out in my work, that's a way of understanding the shamanic journey. That's the toggling between the amnesia and the an amnesia.

Aubrey Marcus
You know, one of the concepts, and you know, that I think you illuminate in your book as well is that Witiko evokes Witiko. It is actually contagious. Oh, completely. So if I'm encountering somebody in their overrun by Witico, it's this contagious field, and it will evoke my own witiko and my own reactiveness and my own response. And it's remarkable to me, however much attention and awareness I've cultivated, that it still happens.

Paul Levy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I'll feel that coming in from my partner or from someone close to me, and I'll be like, somehow it'll evoke that thing. And it's that idea of the shempa, the hook. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Triggered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. I'm so glad you're bringing that up. Because one way of understanding that when you see the unconscious, right. It's impossible to see the unconscious without your unconscious being activated.

It's non local. Right. And so think about it. You see somebody else is possessed by Waitko in that moment, right? And they're playing it out.

It's going to activate your Waitiko. And then you're at a choice point, like, are you just going to become possessed by the Waitiko that's gotten triggered in you and then acted out, which just, like, continues the infinite reinforcing feedback loop, the cycle, or are you going to be aware? Oh, wow, that guy is playing out the swatiko now. I feel it. Oh, what an opportunity for me, instead of putting my attention out there to turn it on myself and to reflect upon what in me is being triggered.

That's an incredible opportunity. And so, yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that because particularly when you have some sort of group, like a. A collectivity, say if somebody is really the one who's the leader of the group, if they're possessed by Witeko, and it resonates with other people, whether it's ten people or a million, and they all start to reinforce each other's point of view, that's a collective psychosis. And then any reflection upon what they're doing oh, it just gets rejected or integrated in a way to support their psychosis. And that's really sort of evidence of what you're pointing out about the contagiousness of Waitiko.

But then the other part of it is that people who are awakening and who are cultivating compassion, they become, in a way, like antipsychotic agents in the non local field, equally contagious. And that's what I'm trying to bring. And I know so are you. The idea that as we turn more and more people on to who they are in a way that unlocks their creativity and their love and compassion, they see the dreamlike nature, they recognize the non local field. There are a zillion ways of describing it.

Then all of a sudden, we can get in phase. And when the 100th monkey idea, when there's a sufficient number of people who are in resonance in that way, it can dream the rest of the dream into that. That's the sacred power of dreaming. Yeah. I mean, I feel so blessed to have had a direct way, to have my way of knowing my own anthro ontology, what I feel and know in my body, through my practice of the medicine journeys and so many things have pointed me this direction.

Aubrey Marcus
An early Wachuma journey was a vision that I had where all of the. We were. I was in this huge group of people, and we were all going through these same motions, robotically going through the same motions. And I just become aware of these motions that I'm going through, and I go, why am I doing this? Why is everybody doing this?

And I stop, right? And I get very still, and I look around me, and then I go. And I reach over to somebody next to me, and I just put my hand on their heart, and they stop what they're doing, and they look at me, and then they go, oh. And then they look at. They look at the other people, and they start putting their hand on another person's heart, and it starts moving and moving and rippling out through this field where it's, like, awake, like, becoming awake, then can help awaken others, which will help awaken others, which is the opposite of this kind of collective psychosis, which creates all the mob mentality.

Exactly. The fomenting of all that. And it's this point in his work, Jung again and again points out that the awakening has to start through the individual, you know? And he has this beautiful image. He says, if you, like, have this glass of water and take, like, a grain of sugar and dissolve it, it'll dissolve, and you take the second grain of sugar, it'll dissolve again and again and again until it reaches the saturation point.

Paul Levy
And then you add one more grain of sugar, and a crystal will manifest. He says that's the way in our unconscious that symbols manifest. But it's also what that means is that any one of us having realization of seeing what he's seeing, our shadow, the dreamlike nature, the quantum field, whatever, however you describe it, that could be the grain of sugar that crystallizes a global awakening in humanity. And seeing that, that's so inspiring. And it's true.

I mean, and, you know, as I more and more study young, I more and more get, oh, my God. He was totally switched onto this. He wasyou know, we had all these quotes about it, like, you know, oh, for an individual to have the realization, they're the I think he says, make weight that tips the scale. You know, I love that phrase. And because it's so easy to feel helpless as an individual and to feel despair and pessimism.

But if you're feeling that, you're unwittingly offering yourselves into the hands of Huatico. Yeah, that's one of the classic moves, is to say the dark forces want to say, we're so powerful, you don't stand a chance anyways. So don't even try. Don't even try. Just go.

Aubrey Marcus
Go hide in your bunker somewhere because it's all so bad that you don't stand a chance. And if you fall victim to that, then Witiko wins. And you're then part of the problem, not the solution. Right there. And it's really a big bluff.

It's a game of bluff. And I think that's what these totalitarian forces have used so often. It's this show of strength that then convinces people. This show of strength is too strong. We don't have a chance anyways.

And so even though the numbers and the power and the actual rests within the people because of this show of force and this belief in the force. And that's one thing I've seen, and tragically so, in this time, where with Tycho, the darkness has become revealed, particularly for me, over the last four years and everything that happened with the pandemic and all of this. And it's continuing to reveal itself. Some people have stared into that abyss and given it so much respect and so much credit that they see everything as Witico. And they just say, we don't stand a chance.

Paul Levy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no reason to even fight. Just and that's exactly the opposite. That's exactly what Witiko wants you to believe, right? Totally.

And that's where, like, people talk about, oh, I have to get rid of my ego or kill my ego. And I point out, well, that's not quite a correct understanding because, yeah, the ego, it doesn't exist in a way. So you have to see through the mirage of the ego. But we have to develop a strong sense of ego or strong sense of self to encounter these darker forces or we'll get destroyed, you know? And, yeah, so I've, you know, and I've learned this, like, you know, I think about, like, in, like, fairy tales, they'll talk, they'll, it's so much symbolic truth is really expressed in fairy tales.

And there are some fairy tales where the hero or the heroine, they'll meet the monster in the middle of the fairy tale, and if they turn to fight it, they'll get destroyed because they don't have enough ego strength and they have to run. And that runs. That running away isn't cowardice, it's having wisdom. But then at a certain point, towards the end of the fairy tale, that heroine or hero will meet the monster, and then if they run, that's cowardice, then they have to face it. And the idea is they've developed ego strength through all the magical encounters they've.

Aubrey Marcus
Had in the fairytale and typically allies as well. Right. And I've experienced that also where I remember. So my father passes, and he was, again, as I've shared deeply under the spell of Witiko, where it was just the voice of the deceiver that was coming through. I mean, he couldn't see truth from the fiction in his own mind.

So he passes. And so I'm in the mourning process, and I go into one of my own most important private, reflective medicine journeys just on my own. And I encounter this force in its largesse, in its largest extra dimensional force, and it has this kind of mocking, derisive voice, and it says, you know, I have your father. What are you going to do about it, right? And I could feel it.

And I was like, fuck. Like, actually, I can't face you right now. I'm not strong enough. I've been crying and running for three days. I'm all alone here in this.

And I don't have the force to actually do anything about this. So I called up all of my sacred allies. I have, like, a necklace, actually, where we've exchanged beads. And these are like, my soul family, my ohana. And I called them all together, and I was like, all right, we're going to go into a journey together to help see if we can liberate my father.

Now, whether this is story or actual, again, this is what's playing out in my own psyche. I also think that there's a reasonable chance that these things are actually not only within, but also true without. But in either case, this was the process that was going through me. So we go back into that, and I have all the support, you know, I have, you know, shamans and medicine friends and different powerful people with their voices and drums and prayers and all around me, and we go again, encounter that force, and for about an hour, we all in alignment. We are all kind of contesting with this, but it's still, like, it still has my father.

It still holds him. And it took another resurgence of all of us kind of gathering, going back into the medicine again. And as a collective effort, it was like a rugby scrum where if my father was the boss and this force with Tycho in its aggregate was over the ball, we had to just collectively push, push, push, push, push to liberate my father from this force. And then I saw this just beautiful, beautiful release. And from there, my connections in spiritual connections, and my ability to access the true voice of my father really opened up from that one moment.

But it's exactly the story you're saying. I encountered it. I wasn't strong enough at that point on my own. I needed to, one be stronger, and also I needed all my allies. But this is the story.

This is the hero's journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gather the allies, come back. Right. No, it's so funny as you're describing that.

Paul Levy
I mean, that's an amazing experience. And a part of me just in a funny way wants to say, oh, that's just your imagination. But the point is. Yeah, that's. The primordial faculty is our imagination.

Aubrey Marcus
Yes, exactly. And, wow, that really speaks to me, because I'll share. There's a dream, one of the most amazing dreams I ever had, and in it, I had the recognition I was dreaming. So I was having this lucid dream, and I was flying not only through the air, but through the cosmos, in outer space. And in Tibetan Buddhism, there's a practice that every practitioner does.

Paul Levy
It's the hundred syllable mantra. And so I was chanting it. It was almost like that was my fuel, that was fueling my journey through the cosmos, and it was just an unbelievable state. And then I realized, oh, I'm about to land on a planet. And the planet was, I knew, right in my mind, oh, this is the planet of the undead.

And, you know, the undead. Vampires, right? Or zombies. Yeah, yeah. Right.

And I land, and who do I go? Right up, there's one being I see, and it's this reptilian demon. And I approach him, and I right away know, oh, my God, he's eaten my father. He's devoured my father. And there's no way I can save my father that he's been totally digested and metabolized.

And I'm face to face with him, and I. And that's when I woke up, you know, and I'm still working. I'm doing active imagination in all different ways on the dream. And it's been years. Yeah.

You know. Yeah. It's these myths, you know, these myths, again, they speak through the collective to give us kind of guideposts. And I think understanding that whether or not this actually had any impact on my father's soul or whether it didn't. Oh, I would imagine it totally.

How could it not? Of course I believe that. But even if it didn't, what it did for me and how I feel and. Like, when I go sit in my father's grave. Exactly.

Aubrey Marcus
And I talk to him, like the effect that it had. So even if there's a skeptic out there that's like, ah, this is all nonsense or whatever. What is not nonsense is through this act of imagination or actually real perception. Either way, it doesn't matter. The effect that it had was undeniably positive on my life, your life, that I will carry forward and memory of my father in all of its ways.

So this is a way. And I think what you're saying about the imagination is so important. People try to discard something. Oh, you just imagined it, right? What do you mean?

You just imagined it? When you start to understand the dreamlike nature of reality, like, the imagination is like. Is the fundamental substratum. Yeah. It's like we.

Paul Levy
That's what quantum physics is really pointing at. That we are creating our experience of ourselves and of the world each and every moment. There's no one else doing that. We are whatever's happening, right? We're then interpreting the ink plot.

We're the ones who are placing meaning on what's happening. We're creating our experience. We have this incredible agency. But to the extent that we're not conscious of it, then all of a sudden, we feel victimized. You know, it's very much like that.

And then if I could just tell you this one other dream that keeps on coming up. And it's an example of going from the personal point of view, of seeing, like, if I just were thinking of my father, what happened with my father from the personal point of view, I would be fucked. But thankfully, I was able more and more to access the archetypal dimension. And what I mean is that, oh, well, there's a deeper sort of mythic pattern that's playing out in my life, and I'm just an instrument for something archetypal or higher dimensional to play out. And the dream is very simple.

I was with my father after. Yeah, it's after he died. And I say to him, just as, like a son saying to a father, you know, dad, you've really hurt me. And, you know, and I was just expressing, like, that type of thing to him. And all of a sudden, in the dream, this spirit just came into me, and it was like a nuclear bomb.

It just exploded to the point where I could barely even contain it. And that barely even opened my mouth to say the words that came out. And the words were, get thee behind me, Satan. And then I woke up, and it was like the first part of the dream, it's just Paul trying to work out something with his dad. And the next part of the dream, it was the archetypal myth, because twice Christ said that to Satan in the Bible.

And here I was just like an ordinary person. And yet I got enlisted into this deeper, mythic, archetypal drama. And seeing that helped me, because if I didn't have access to that point of view, I could easily have just pathologized myself for all these wounds and traumas. But then I began to realize, no, there is some deeper cosmic drama that is playing out through me, and it's playing out through all of us. That's the point.

Aubrey Marcus
Yeah. That idea of get thee behind me, Satan, it really shows the propulsion of a person on their hero's journey. And all of these traumas and all these things behind you means that it's not isolated in some past pocket that you haven't integrated. Where it's trauma. It's actually no.

Literally woven back into your history. In a way, it's woven into your story, into the wholeness of who you are. So it is actually behind you. You no longer have to face it in front of you over and over and over again, actually behind you, because you've integrated into part of your story and you can carry forward with telos. You know, it's so crazy.

Paul Levy
I'm just having this experience in talking with you that I'm like, talking to a part of myself, it's so crazy. Yeah. You know? Yeah. That was what reading this book was for me.

Aubrey Marcus
It was like, oh, wow. Like, here's another person who's really shifted his sights to this force that I've had my sights on as well. And, yeah, it's just like a real. It is like a dream, in a way, to just know that there's another traveler of the way who's been eyes locked on this. And.

Paul Levy
Cause it's so obvious that we both are plugged into the same thing. And the idea that we, you and me and all of us people who are awakening, we can connect with each other and to dream ourselves awake, that that's totally within our capability. We already possess the very thing we need. We are that. And in a sense, that's, as I more and more integrate, that's what I'm really, and I know the same with you, that that's what we're trying.

And it's contagious. It can go viral. And I totally see that happening. And to be prepared that as we stand more in the polarity of the dispeller of this darkness, also fully, vulnerably aware of our own wounds and our own fallibility. And I think that's also the important part, because if not, then there's part of the demon, the shadow, the wittica, that's acting on us.

Aubrey Marcus
So it's a radical vulnerability, but actually standing for it. We're going to attract the murder of Christ. We're going to attract the murder of. And that's not conflating ourselves with the Christ. Oh, yeah, totally.

As soon as we step into that purity, the darkness will be drawn to us. Oh, completely. It's just a law. It's a law I have. I mean, yeah, no, I so appreciate you saying that, because just even in the last, like, I don't know, six to nine months, I've had two incredible dreams, and they were basically the same dream.

Paul Levy
I was, like, surrounded by archetypal evil in the dream, and the first one, I'm trembling so hard, and I'm chanting. In Tibetan Buddhism, Padma sambhava is the supreme exorcist, and I'm chanting his mantra. And the dream went on for an hour, and the whole while I'm just completely trembling in fear. But when I woke up, I was so happy that that was my go to. And then just a few weeks ago, I had another one of those dreams, and I'm in my bed back in my childhood home, and this evil force is picking up the bed and throwing it to the other side of the room, and I'm on the bed, and I see it wants to destroy me.

And instead of the panma sambhava mantra, I just began spontaneously chanting, o mani pe me hong, the mantra of compassion. And that was so cool. Cause it felt like. Oh, yeah. It was almost like I had gone back in time to the bed I grew up in where the abuse had happened, and I was just, like, you know, infusing it with compassion.

And also, when I woke up, I was so happy. Oh, my God. That that was my go to instead of just freaking out or being, you know, whatever. So, yeah, what you're saying, I mean, it's not for the faint of heart, you know, to do this path, but this is what we're here to do. I mean, this is who we are.

We're all being called to do this. And the fact that we can actually help other people and inspire other people, it's what I call to coin, to inspire, to co inspire, to activate the collective genius that we can do that. And it's totally. It can go viral, and I just see that really clear. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
And to just remind people, too, that any personal victory over Witiko, over anti you is a universal victory. Right? It's all connected. The personal and the universal is connected, even if you don't even talk to anybody about it, even if it's a private battle that you win that's uploaded to the collective. Oh, instance.

And your access point. The greatest access point you're gonna have to. The darkness is within yourself, right? That those victories within yourself are actually victories over the collective force also. So just remember, like, there's no private battle that's insignificant.

There's no private victory that isn't recorded. That's so beautiful. And that brings up for me, the idea of the shaman of the wounded healer.

Paul Levy
I think of my own process, say I'll be sitting in meditation, and my wound will come up. At that moment, I have a choice. I can either interpret my wound coming up as evidence that I'm really wounded, and then I'm actually investing in my identity as being a wounded person, which just feeds the feedback loop of then I'm going to experience more wounding. Or if in that moment, I can be awake, and if I can have the recognition that in that present moment, my wound coming up, it's actually a display of awareness, and it's not separate from my awareness. And I don't have to cling to it.

I don't have to push it away. I don't have to identify with it. I can just allow it to self liberate. And then the wound coming up actually has deepened my realization. Yeah.

Aubrey Marcus
And then all obstacles become the way, right? Exactly. And all the stoic philosophy. That's the real alchemy of transmuting the lead into the gold. Exactly.

Well, we got to do this again, Paul. Oh, totally. We got to do this again. This has been an absolute delight. I really appreciate you and just commend you for your courage.

And I think there's that quote from Nietzsche, and it's something about, beware of staring into the abyss, for the abyss stares back into it. I remember I was in a very, very intense isolation diete. And I don't know if you know, the practice of diet. So I was in diet, and it was just darkness after darkness and really dealing with my own disgust and horror with everything. And it was visions continually, and it was like.

But I stayed with it. And I was like, all right, I know the way out is through. If I turn away, it will just haunt me forever. So I stayed through, and I stayed through, and I stayed through. And there was a part of me that said, okay, well, the abyss has stared back into me.

And now what? And now what? And now to know myself as being able to have the abyss look back into me and say, like, I'm still here. You know, there was a great, like that was, I think one of the deepest lessons of that journey was, it's okay. Understand that as you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back into you.

As you stare into Witiko. Yeah, Witiko will stare back into you, and you'll be faced with that force. But there, that doesn't mean that all will be lost. If you can stand in that fire, in that crucible of transformation as the alchemist, as the mage, as the wizard, you can make it through, and you'll be able to actually share that liberation with others. But it takes amazing courage.

And I say all this because you've stared into that abyss, and the abyss has stared back into you, and here you are still standing and serving. Well, thank you. And it's funny, I guess I want to say, because so many people have said something like that to me about my carts, and I don't feel that at all, because for me, it didn't feel like a choice, I mean, really. And then one final thought for me, I remember after having my experience in 1981 82, the blind woman being, that was just one of them. And there were experiences that made that look sort of minor.

Paul Levy
And I remember then I met these lamas, you know, back, back in New York and of course I was telling them all of these experiences, these unbelievable miracle over the top experiences, and they would listen and, you know, and it's their thing. I mean, they're very fluent and familiar in that realm. And they said to me, they said what you need is to develop more compassion. And I just thought that was the greatest answer, you know? Beautiful.

Yeah, beautiful. Wow. So I just so appreciate hanging out with you, really. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure everybody.

Aubrey Marcus
Hopefully you got a lot from this podcast. You have a collection of books I personally read, undreaming with Tico, found it as one of the top ten books I've ever read in my life and also letting people know my book, you versus Auntie, you will be coming out at some point as well and deep in the writing process there. So yeah, blessings on your journey, everybody. And blessings on your journey, Paul, consider me an ally. Thank you.

Paul Levy
You same. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Much love everybody. Peace.

Aubrey Marcus
Thanks for tuning into this show with Paul Levy, everybody. And keep a lookout for preorders for my next book, you versus anti you going to become available hopefully this September. I love you guys and I'll see you next week.

The Wetiko Mind Virus: Counteracting Self-Sabotage w/ Paul Levy # 463

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1: Introduction to Wetiko

2: Personal Encounters with Wetiko

3: Strategies Against Wetiko

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