There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called "wetiko"—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, author Paul Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko is its own antidote, which once recognized can help us wake up and bring sanity back to our society.
• Explores how wetiko covertly operates both out in the world and within our minds and how it underlies every form of self-destruction, both individual and collective • Reveals how wetiko’s power lies in our blindness to it and examines how people across the ages have symbolized wetiko to help see it and heal it • Examines the concept of wetiko as it appears in the teachings of the Kabbalah, Hawaiian Kahuna shamanism, mystical Christianity, and the work of C. G. Jung In its Native American meaning, wetiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people’s minds, leading to selfshness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself, destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity. Revealing the presence of wetiko in our modern world behind every form of destruction our species is carrying out, both individual and collective, Paul Levy shows how this mind-virus is so embedded in our psyches that it is almost undetectable--and it is our blindness to it that gives wetiko its power. Yet, as Levy reveals in striking detail, by recognizing this highly contagious mind parasite, by seeing wetiko, we can break free from its hold and realize the vast creative powers of the human mind. Levy explores how artists, philosophers, and spiritual traditions across the ages have been creatively symbolizing this deadly pathogen of the psyche so as to help us see it and heal it. He examines the concept of wetiko as it appears in the teachings of the Kabbalah, Hawaiian kahuna shamanism, Buddhism, and mystical Christianity and through esoteric concepts like egregores, demons, counterfeiting spirits, and psychic vampires. He reveals how visionary thinkers such as C. G. Jung, Sri Aurobindo, Philip K. Dick, Colin Wilson, Nicolas Berdyaev, and Rene Girard each point to wetiko in their own unique and creative way. He explores how the projection of the shadow self--scapegoating --is the underlying psychological mechanism fueling wetiko and examines wetiko in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, showing that we can reframe the pandemic so as to receive the lessons and opportunities embedded in it. Revealing how the power of imagination can cure the wetiko mind-virus, Levy underscores how important it is for each of us to bring forth the creative spirit within us, which helps shed the light of consciousness on wetiko, taking away its power over us while simultaneously empowering ourselves.
There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called "wetiko"—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, author Paul Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko is its own antidote, which once recognized can help us wake up and bring sanity back to our society.
Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern "civilized" lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before. Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes: "Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism." This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.
This book is about the invisible or subtle nature of food and farming, and also about the nature of existence. Everything that we know (and do not know) about the physical world has a subtle counterpart which has been scarcely considered in modernist farming practice and research. If you think this book isn’t for you, if it appears more important to attend to the pressing physical challenges the world is facing before having the luxury of turning to such subtleties, then think again. For it could be precisely this worldview – the one prioritises the physical-material dimension of reality - that helped get us into this situation in the first place. Perhaps we need a different worldview to get us out? This book makes a foundational contribution to the discipline of Subtle Agroecologies, a nexus of indigenous epistemologies, multidisciplinary advances in wave-based and ethereal studies, and the science of sustainable agriculture. Not a farming system in itself, Subtle Agroecologies superimposes a non-material dimension upon existing, materially-based agroecological farming systems. Bringing together 43 authors from 12 countries and five continents, from the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities, this multi-contributed book introduces the discipline, explaining its relevance and potential contribution to the field of Agroecology. Research into Subtle Agroecologies may be described as the systematic study of the nature of the invisible world as it relates to the practice of agriculture, and to do this through adapting and innovating with research methods, in particular with those of a more embodied nature, with the overall purpose of bringing and maintaining balance and harmony. Such research is an open-minded inquiry, its grounding being the lived experiences of humans working on, and with, the land over several thousand years to the present. By reclaiming and reinterpreting the perennial relationship between humans and nature, the implications would revolutionise agriculture, heralding a new wave of more sustainable farming techniques, changing our whole relationship with nature to one of real collaboration rather than control, and ultimately transforming ourselves.
A vision to address our environment, economy, politics, culture, and to catalyze the radical whole-system change we need now Recasting current problems as emergent opportunities, Terry Patten offers creative responses, practices, and conscious conversations for tackling the profound inner and outer work we must do to build an integral future. In practical and personal terms, he discusses how we can all become active agents of a transformation of human civilization and why that is necessary to our continued survival. Patten's narrative focuses on two aspects of existence--our dynamic but fractured and threatened world, and our underlying wholeness and unity. Only by honoring both of these realities simultaneously can we make sustainable changes in ourselves, our communities, our body politic, and our planetary life-support system. A New Republic of the Heart provides a comprehensive understanding and inspiring vision for "being the change" in a way that can address the most intractable problems of our time. Patten shows how we can come together in our communities for conversations that matter and describes new communities, enterprises, and forms of dialogue that integrate both inner personal growth work with outer awareness, activism, and service.
This is a demanding book—but our times are demanding. It is an honest book—and our times demand truth. —Matthew Fox, American priest, theologian, and author The genius of this book is the knowledge that this catastrophe is a necessary precursor to a radical transformation that we are co-creating with the divine. Radical Regeneration is an indispensable guide for what lies ahead. —Betty J. Kovács, Ph.D., author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World This book, Radical Regeneration, is a radiant offering of the possibility of the evolution of human consciousness in the midst of extinction. It’s exactly the fierce and sacred medicine we need right now. —V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues and The Apology Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker invite us to rise to these times as a grand initiation, to be renewed in splendor, or to stand idly and be swallowed by Kali, the goddess of time and death. —Alberto Villoldo PhD, Bestselling author of One Spirit Medicine and Shaman Healer Sage If ever we needed a guidebook that truly addressed the crises of our times while inspiring us with guidance and wisdom, this is that book. —Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Intimate Conversations with the Divine What is being made crystal clear is that humanity stands at a monumentally fragile threshold with two stark choices placed before it in a situation of complete uncertainty: Those choices are: 1) To continue to worship a vision of power, totally distanced from sacred reality 2) Or to choose the path of submitting bravely to the alchemy of being transfigured by a global dark night event that shatters all illusions but reveals the greatest imaginable possibility being born out of the greatest imaginable disaster. If humanity chooses the second path, which is what is being celebrated in this book, then it will have trained itself in the new radical unity necessary to weather the even worse crises that most certainly will quickly follow.
There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives—peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are persuaded to separate from the body and live in the head. Disconnected from the body’s intelligence, we also disconnect from the wholeness of the present. This schism within us is the primary source of stress not just in our personal lives, but for the systems of the planet. Drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, physics, the arts, myth, personal stories and his experiences helping people around the world to experience wholeness, Philip Shepherd illuminates what true wholeness means and offers practices designed to help readers soften into the intelligence of the body. Radical Wholeness is a call to action: to recover wholeness and experience a new way of being.
We are on the brink of an ecological mega-crisis threatening the future of life on earth and our actions over the next few years may well determine the destiny of our descendants. Between a manifesto and a tactical plan of action, How Soon is Now? by radical futurist and philosopher Daniel Pinchbeck outlines a vision for a mass social movement that will address this crisis. Drawing on a huge range of resources and references Daniel Pinchbeck presents a compelling argument for the need for change on a global basis – it is only when we see ourselves as one planetary tribe that this change can occur. The central thesis is that humanity has self-willed the ecological crisis in order to bring about the necessary conditions for transcendence of our current state of being, by undergoing an initiatory ordeal on a planetary scale. This collective ordeal is necessary for us to evolve from one state of being – our current level of consciousness – to the next. By passing through this initiation we realize ourselves as one unified being, a planetary super-organism in a symbiotic relationship with the Earth's ecology and the entire web of life. Covering everything from energy and agriculture, to culture, politics, media and ideology, Pinchbeck's book is ultimately about the nature of the human soul and the future of our current world. He calls for an intentional and consciously designed metamorphosis of our current systems, which transform capitalist and exclusive structures into participatory, democratic, and inclusive ones, based on an integration of Eastern metaphysics, social ecology, and radical political thought. "How Soon is Now? gives us the context we need to understand the chaos and turbulence of our times." – Sting
