Step into the extraordinary journey of Paul Levy, where trauma birthed spiritual awakening, and profound insights emerged from the depths of struggle. In this interview, delve into the mind-virus of wetiko, the collective dream of reality, and the transformative power of embracing our shared humanity. MysticMag has the pleasure.
What led you to your spiritual awakening and what was your professional journey like after that?
It all came out of incredible trauma when I was in my early 20s. Without going into the story, the pain and suffering were so intense that it forced me to turn inwards. There was nothing else I could do that was helpful except assume the position of a witness in my own mind towards the suffering that I was experiencing and so I did just that. That catalyzed a spontaneous spiritual awakening in me. At one moment, I got hit by a bolt of lightning, not outside, from the sky, but within my brain, while I was sitting in meditation. Little did I realize at the time that I was having a kundalini awakening. Within hours I went into a completely altered state in which I began to realize that we’re all having a collective dream, that this is a shared dream that each one of us, whether we know it or not, is dreaming up into materialization each and every moment. I was so excited about what I was realizing that I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm and it freaked people out. They thought I was having a psychotic break.
Within the first 24 hours, I was hospitalized and immediately pathologized by the psychiatrists, who told me that I was mentally ill and that I would need to be on medication for the rest of my life. However, I knew that the psychiatrists had no idea what they were talking about. It was very clear and self-evident from my vantage point inside of myself that I was having a spiritual awakening. I never doubted this—and that’s what saved my life. Within the next 18 months, I was hospitalized 3 or 4 other times, as I was trying to metabolize what I was realizing in a world that had little to no understanding of matters such as this. The realization I was having—of the dreamlike nature of reality—was so overwhelming that all that I needed was time and a safe space in order to integrate what I was realizing. Indigenous cultures better understand this. The way I was expressing what I was realizing was, understandably, oftentimes triggering and upsetting to people, making them think I was crazy.
Now, 40+ years later, I’m saying the exact same thing I was saying then, but I’ve more deeply integrated the realization and become much more grounded, fluent, and articulate in expressing what I am realizing in such a way that I don’t get myself thrown in mental hospitals. On the contrary, I have therapists, psychiatrists, and Jungian analysts who study with me and pay me money to hang out with me. This was definitely a nice turn of events since the early days of my awakening.
What specific services do you offer?
On one hand, I have a whole community that’s formed around me. Every week, I have at least four groups (sometimes five), two in Portland, Oregon, where I live, in person in my living room, and two international ones, over Zoom, with people from all over the world. I also have a private practice, though I’m not a therapist. However, I’ve written books on what’s at the bottom of the collective insanity in our world – the source of the madness and evil that’s being acted out in our world is a mind-virus which the indigenous people call wetiko. I’ve written 3 books on the topic that are helping people all over the world. That’s why people want to talk to me because my work is a form of medicine that seems to inspire people and speaks to many people’s struggles in these challenging times.
One of the pivotal points in my journey was a direct encounter with archetypal evil. I’ve written a book about this experience, called Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father. Through my encounter with evil, I’ve managed to keep my heart open, cultivate awareness, and not be destroyed by it, though it destroyed my whole family. When I earlier mentioned the trauma I experienced, I was referring to the trauma that happened in my family. I haven’t had a family for over 20 years, though I have a huge soul family. However, due to that shattering encounter with evil, I’ve been able, after a lot of work on myself, to find my voice and unlock my creative spirit in a way that’s healing myself as well as helping people all over the world. My direct encounter with evil has given me a real authority to write on the subject.
Nowadays, we are all impacted by what’s happening in the world and many of us are traumatized by it all. Finding someone else who’s been through it, who knows the terrain, and is fluent in the language, can be so helpful. Even though my experience was my own unique personal experience, going through trauma also has an archetypal, universal aspect. It’s an experience that deep down we all share in one way or another. There is no getting around it, we have to shed light on the darkness—particularly the darkness within ourselves—or suffer the negative consequences of our blindness.
When people find my work, they discover somebody who’s been able to language and articulate what so many people are experiencing and struggling with in their own lives. I’ve somehow managed, with the help of the creative spirit which is intrinsic to our nature yet somehow beyond our conscious ego and intellect, to turn the horror of it all into medicine. Occasionally I’ve taught classes on wetiko.
What is wetiko?
Wetiko is an indigenous, Native American term that connotes this mind-virus which is actually the source of the incredible evil in our world and in our own minds. It’s at the root of the collective madness that our species is acting out all over the planet. When people at first hear about this idea of wetiko, it feels scary. Wetiko then feeds off our fear, as fear is superfood for the mind-virus. There’s actually nothing to be afraid of, however, for wetiko has no power over us except the power we unwittingly give to it. Some people think that the idea of a mind-virus is some new-age woo-woo theory, but all the idea of a mind-virus really means is that the source—and the solution—of our collective madness is to be found within our psyche, which, to me, is a no-brainer. Where else in the world could the source of our collective madness be found?
We’re currently in the middle of a psychic epidemic of epic proportions. That’s what wetiko is – a collective psychosis. Wetiko works through the projective tendencies of our mind, such that we entrance ourselves via our own unconscious projections and unrealized creative genius. Quantum physics has revealed that we are creating our experience—of both the world and ourselves—at each and every moment, via our interpretation of and how we place meaning on our experience. To the extent that we are unconscious of our own creative agency and power, this mind-virus actually turns our creative genius for creating our experience against us, resulting in us hypnotizing and brainwashing ourselves. It’s like we create a cocoon around ourselves which will ultimately suffocate us.
Another way of understanding wetiko is that it is a misidentification of who we think we are. For example, when we are affected by wetiko, we identify ourselves as existing as a separate self, which is an illusion that continually reinforces itself, as once we hold this perspective, we will draw all the evidence we need to confirm the objective truth of our viewpoint. Thinking we exist as a separate self, however, is not who we are in reality. We are profoundly interconnected and interdependent with others, with the whole universe actually. But, if a person mistakenly identifies with being a separate self, they will invest all of their life-force in defending and protecting this imaginary separate self, a fictitious identity that doesn’t even exist. This process is at the very root of our individual and collective madness.
I can also describe wetiko as a form of psychic blindness. It’s a peculiar form of blindness, however, that not only doesn’t know that it’s blind but believes that it’s sighted, even thinking that it’s more sighted than people who actually see. One of the chief features of wetiko is that you accuse other people of doing what you yourself are unconsciously doing. Another characteristic of a mind under the sway of the wetiko mind-virus is having the conscious intention to create something but your unconscious actions create the exact opposite. It all goes back to being asleep to our true nature, as if we think we are awake in a dream without realizing we are actually dreaming – basically not realizing the nature of our situation. As creative beings, when we are under the thrall of wetiko our creativity gets outsourced and turned against us.
Every spiritual tradition from time immemorial has been pointing out wetiko, just referring to it by different names. For example, wetiko is in the Apocryphal texts of the Bible, which calls it “the counterfeiting spirit.” Wetiko has no creativity at all on its own, but it’s a master mime and impersonator. This virus of the mind “puts us on,” which has a double meaning – it fools and deceives us, tricking us out of right mind. Putting us on also means, like putting on a suit of clothes, that wetiko assumes and takes on our form. If we’re not awake in that moment, we will identify with wetiko’s limited and false image of ourselves. Then it has us, such that it can control and manipulate us. This is the strategy of wetiko – it inspires us to identify with who we are not, while helping us forget who we actually are. It can’t steal our soul, but it tricks us into giving it away ourselves. We then become dissociated from our own vastly creative nature. This is a recipe for madness, which can be traced back to the trickery and deception of this virus of the mind. Incredibly elusive, wetiko is a trickster par excellence.
I’ve written three books about wetiko. It’s a very profound idea. The great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung points out that in times of mass psychosis such as ours, only a “new symbolic idea” that embraces, expresses, and recontextualizes the emerging chaos and disorder in a new way can help us. wetiko is exactly a new symbolic idea, a saving idea. This is why the great tyrants of history were most afraid of one thing – a new idea whose time has come. This is a very simple way of describing wetiko.
As an author, what books have you written, including the ones about wetiko, and why would you recommend them to our readers?
I’ve written 6 books and I have two more coming out this fall, with one being a new expanded edition of my previous book on quantum physics and spirituality called The Quantum Revelation: Awakening to the Dreamlike Nature of Reality. I am not a physicist, but I recognized that the revelations emerging from quantum physics perfectly mapped onto and described the dreamlike nature of reality. I wrote this book on quantum physics because the revelations that are emerging from quantum physics are offering us the medicine for the wetiko mind-virus. Quantum physics has proven empirically that the act of observing this universe actually influences the universe that we are observing. This is a precise description of a dream, where the observer and the observed are ultimately one. Most corporately trained physicists are neither trained nor inwardly prepared to take in the utterly radical revelation that quantum physics is offering us – that this universe is a collectively shared dream.
As I mentioned before, I’ve also written three books on wetiko. I planned on writing just one book on the topic, but then the realization just continued to deepen and I kept on getting more and more downloads on the seemingly never-ending profundity and relevance of wetiko, so, much to my surprise I wrote two more books on the subject. I would recommend any of these three books to anyone interested to know more about this mind-virus. I might even be writing a fourth book on the topic – I seem to not be able to get away from writing about it.
If we look at the Carlos Castaneda’s books, which are very famous shamanic books, Carlos’s teacher, Don Juan, is pointing at wetiko but doesn’t use the name wetiko, but rather, calls it the predator. He says that for shamans this is “the topic of topics,” which is to say that there’s nothing more important than understanding the covert workings of this mind-virus. It’s the source of all of the converging catastrophes that, like sorcerer’s apprentices, we are currently, but unconsciously and hence, destructively, conjuring up in our world. Wetiko is in actuality a living revelation – unless we recognize what this mind-virus is revealing to us about our own creative power, however, we are fated to continue to unconsciously destroy ourselves. There’s nothing more important in the world than shedding light on how wetiko operates, both out in the world and within our own mind (via our projections and unconscious reactions), for if we don’t consciously recognize what wetiko is revealing to us, nothing else will matter, as there will be no more human species. A quantum phenomena, wetiko is the source of the greatest evil, while at the same time this virus of the mind has holographically encoded within it the possibility of being the greatest catalyst for the evolution of the human species that we’ve ever known. Wetiko is—in true quantum style, potentially—helping people to wake up and remember who we are. How wetiko manifests—will it take us down or wake us up?—depends on whether we recognize what it is revealing to us about ourselves.
Two of my teachers, these genuinely realized beings from Tibet, have written a book called The Six Bardos of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I was honored to be asked to write the forward for this book, which is coming out this coming November. So these two new books, one on quantum physics and one on the BuddhaDharma, are the two book projects I’ve been working on that will be out soon.
What are your Awakening in the Dream Groups like and what can a person expect from joining one of them?
People can get in touch with me if they want to join, but there’s usually a waiting list. If people are fated to be part of these dreaming groups, however, they dream themselves in. These groups are an amazing thing that my friends and I have discovered, we’ve been doing them every week for thirty years – we’ve been trying to figure out for years how to get this out to other people. In these groups we basically bring people who are awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality together, and without any agenda or technique, see what happens – what I call “follow the dreaming.” We meet every week. Some groups meet in-person in Portland (where I live), while the international groups meet on Zoom with people from different parts of the world. We really step into and take this idea that we’re having a dream seriously. We explore what it would look like if we interpreted our moment-by-moment experiences as if we were co-dreaming together, which is, I should add, what is in fact actually happening. If this is a dream—which is what all of the spiritual wisdom traditions continually are pointing at—then you are a dream character of mine and I am a dream character of yours, which is to say, you’re just an embodied reflection of a part of me and vice versa. Things really open up when a group of us view our shared experiences in this way.
It is very psycho-activating when we start to perceive our experience through the lens of our reality being a collectively shared dream. People’s unconscious processes become enlivened and unconscious shadow stuff becomes more available for integration. Our intrinsic creative spirit becomes unlocked. However, if we’re entranced to think that what we see and experience is objectively real and separate from us then we’ve fallen under the spell of the separate self, which is, ultimately speaking, a spell of our own making. In other words, my work is basically helping people—including myself—break out of the spell our species has fallen under. Having fallen under this self-created spell, humanity is blindly creating a huge amount of unnecessary destruction and suffering for ourselves. Like so many of us, I am trying to the best of my capabilities to be of help in a world that needs all the help it can get.
To learn more about Paul and his work, you can visit www.awakeninthedream.com
