He Who Shall Not Be Named - essay
- filipvk
- May 1
- 24 min read
Updated: 23 hours ago
In which is told about why it would be good to stop using the name of you-know-who, or use it as little as possible, about why this is not escapism nor denial but rather a possible opening for greater awareness, compassion, self-knowledge, evolution, change, and responsibility, and how we could potentially start thinking and communicating very differently about he-who-shall-not-be-named and what we could come to understand about our society as a result, ending with a few thoughts about a better world that may await us if we examine our own shadow.
"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it."
Albus Dumbledore in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'
“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.” ― Albus Dumbledore in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'
Audio version of this essay, read by me.
Dear Friends,
As those who have been following this blog for a while will have noticed, I rarely touch on politics in these writings.
This is partly because, in my opinion (and that of many others who are examining the same issues), no political party in the Western industrialized countries, and probably no political party anywhere else in the world, really tells us where we stand, what is needed to get through the convergence of ecological and other crises, what is still possible for us and our future, and what is no longer possible if we want to survive and leave a livable, thriving, and beautiful planet to our children and their children. This is because all political parties are still fundamentally operating on a worldview that assumes permanent economic growth and ever-increasing extraction of raw materials and energy, and exponential growth of the “Machine,” the global economic system that Nate Hagens calls the “Superorganism.” However, I have already explained why this path is inevitably leading to a dead end in this, this, this, and this blog post.
But there is another reason: the focus of my research is shifting more and more to other aspects of that worldview, aspects that often remain outside our field of vision, like the water in which a fish swims, an example I also used in my recent musing 'Silence (part six)'. Aspects that have to do with our deepest convictions about the nature of reality, and the nature of ourselves and the nature of that which so determines us and makes us who we are: our consciousness. Metaphysics and paradigm, so to speak, our worldview, and our worldview can be seen as the largely unconscious 'operating system' that determines our actions on our planet.
Moreover, much of the current political discourse, political ideas, vocabulary, the boundaries of what can and cannot be thought, the customs and mores of that whole theater, are increasingly playing out in a spirit of conflict, intolerance, pettiness, and tendencies toward autocratic or even outright dictatorial tendencies, increasing extremism and intolerance, and increasing suppression of other opinions and worldviews.
And, of course, there is one person who seems to embody and drive that process like no other: he-who-shall-not-be-named. I bet you already know who I'm talking about, even though I haven't mentioned his name.
I recently saw a meme with the caption: “You can now say he's an idiot anywhere in the world, and everyone will immediately know who you're talking about.” And I think that's true. But while everyone will probably know who you're talking about, of course not everyone will agree that he's an idiot. There are many people who still fanatically believe in his power and abilities, and in his mission. But I do think it's true that people all over the world will immediately think of you-know-who.
Incidentally, I'm not trying to defend the claim that he's an idiot. Insulting labels are not necessarily what we need right now. But in this essay, I would like to go into more detail about why I think it would be wise to stop using his name or use it as little as possible, and also to share or publish as few photos of him as possible. That is why I have not used a portrait photo of him in the title of this essay, but a photo of beautiful flowers.
Just like his name, his face also carries a special energy, and it is mainly about that energy that I wanted to say something. Nomen est omen, the Romans said, a name says something about a person. Cambridge Dictionary gives one of the meanings of the verb 'to trump' as: “to be better than, or have more importance or power than another person or thing”. However, another meaning in (British) English is: “to release gas from the bowels from below.” In other words, to fart.
To be better than anyone or anything, and to fart. Nomen est omen indeed. This duality already gives an indication of the energies at work in the name, which I will not mention here.
He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named is, of course, a very well-known name-that-is-not-a-name. Immortalized in the Harry Potter saga, it is a metaphor for the power of a name and the fear of evil. And just as in Harry's world he-who-shall-not-be-named is the personification of evil, many in this world see 'our' you-know-who as the Evil One, a kind of Satan. On the other hand, there are those who see him as a kind of messiah, sent to save the world and, of course, save 'America First'.
American theologian and activist Matthew Fox does not hesitate to label him and his movement as an expression of the 'Antichrist', and he has devoted many of his recent 'Daily Meditations' to substantiating this claim.
Matthew Fox was expelled from the Dominican Order by Pope Benedict XVI (Cardinal Ratzinger) for, among other things, his support for Latin American liberation theology, of which Óscar Romero was a representative. He is the author of numerous books on faith and spirituality, subjects he approaches openly, freely, and with curiosity, in a way that integrates all the great mystical and wisdom traditions and religions of the world. The 'Daily Meditations' are short daily posts in which the 85-year-old theologian tirelessly sends his thoughts out into the world on politics, ecology, justice, spirituality, and so on.
And as chance (or synchronicity) would have it, just as I was thinking about writing this post, Matthew Fox also wrote a 'Daily Meditation' about no longer using the name of you-know-who.
Here is an excerpt from his text:
Don’t use the wannabe king’s name.
Remember this is a regime and he’s not acting alone.
Do not argue with those who support him – it doesn’t work and it makes them feel important. It makes them feel they’ve won something.
Focus on his policies and actions. Do not focus on his personality traits, his physical appearance, or his mental state.
Keep your message positive; they want the country to be angry and fearful because this is the soil from which their darkest policies will grow.
No more helpless/hopeless talk. The numbers don’t lie: there are more of “us” than there are of “them.” Feel that support.
Support artists and the arts.
Be careful not to spread fake news. Fact check it.
Take care of yourself.
Resist! Keep demonstrations peaceful. In the words of John Lennon: When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.
When you post or talk about him, don’t assign his actions to him; assign them to “the Republican Administration.” This will have several effects: the legislators will either have to take responsibility for their association with him or stand up for what some of them don’t like; he will not get the focus of attention he craves. His representatives will become very concerned about their re-elections.
Use humor (at times).
I find this valuable advice, and it resonates in part with what I wanted to say. I wouldn't go so far as to call he-who-shall-not-be-named a personification of evil, because I think the energy of demonizing opponents is used on both sides of the spectrum, resulting in ever-increasing social polarization, dysfunction, and the collapse of any shared reality. And besides, I have my reservations about the concept of evil, which I won't go into here because that would take us too far afield.
But one of the most important points in Matthew's post, in my opinion, is this: any attention you give to you-know-who is a kind of nourishment for him, including, and perhaps especially, negative attention. Because although many experts in the field have diagnosed him with malignant narcissism, and although it is clear how much he-who-shall-not-be-named wants to be praised or even worshipped, it seems to me that negative attention and even hatred feed him and make him grow. He seems like a kind of singularity, like a black hole, a bottomless vortex that swallows everything that comes into its orbit and from which no light can escape. Hate only seems to make him bigger, and that negative energy also gives him what he perhaps desires most of all: the feeling of being the center of the world, almighty, feared by enemies and adored by followers. By no longer using his name and referring to the actions of the administration, you deprive him of that nourishment and growth, and the attention shifts to the policies (or lack thereof) of his administration (if you can seriously use that word to describe who or what is currently in power in the US). The energy that feeds you-know-who and his movement can dry up if it is no longer fed by fear and hatred. Or it can transform into something else: a kind of astonished awakening from a stupor, with the question: “What on earth were we doing?”
As with all narcissists and toxic leaders, beneath that desire to be admired and feared, beneath the relentless expressions of anger, hatred, and contempt, beneath the increasingly intense dishonesty and denial of reality, there lies something else entirely: a deep, gaping wound and a great deal of self-hatred. You don't need to be a trained psychiatrist to see and feel that wound in the case of he-who-shall-not-be-named. It is always the same story: abuse (physical or mental), usually by parents, especially by the father. So many tyrants in our history were once children who were mercilessly beaten by their fathers: Hitler and Stalin, to name two of the most famous. In the case of he-who-shall-not-be-named, that abuse was mainly psychological, and his brother died from the consequences of alcohol abuse, something that his father's contempt must have had a lot to do with.
But I'm not going to analyze the psyche of you-know-who in depth here. That has already been done enough by others. And even something like that feeds his narcissistic “black hole,” his sucking in of energy in any form, his monopolizing of attention and intense negativity. This monopolization of attention works particularly effectively: time and again, he succeeds in his goal of standing at the center of this vortex, feeding off all the dark energy that comes his way, energy that he unleashes by mirroring the wound in society as a whole. Because it must be said: he-who-shall-not-be-named did not become president for the second time by accident. He is a master at sensing the wound in a large part of American and, by extension, Western societies. He knows how to appeal to them like no other, and how to valorize and reinforce the anger, hatred, fear, and negativity in entire layers of that society. As I heard a commentator (I don't remember who) say in an interview during the first term of you-know-who: “He gives everyone permission to be the worst version of themselves.” Because he himself is that, so ostentatious and shameless, without any hesitation or pretense of integrity. He can feel that wound in society so well because he was shaped by it, carries it within him, and protects it from any form of self-reflection, introspection, or real feeling. This is what psychiatrist and author Scott Peck, author of, among other works, 'The Road Less Travelled', called 'militant unawareness', a form of unawareness of one's own wound that will defend itself to the death against the only thing that can heal it: truly feeling and touching it. And because you-know-who is so militant and combative that he almost denies reality altogether, along with his own wound, he gives everyone else permission to do the same. It's a bit like one child in a classroom can cause all hell to break loose by doing The Forbidden Thing during a brief absence of the teacher. "If he or she can do it, then so can I, right?" And before you know it, all the kids have abandoned any form of restraint and everyone is doing what is not allowed but desired.
Scott Peck also says, like Matthew Fox, that this militant unawareness can be a form of Evil, and Peck has also devoted another book to this: 'The People Of The Lie'
Scott Peck identifies the following characteristics of that Evil, or extreme versions of this militant unconsciousness.
According to Peck, an evil person:
is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection
deceives others as a consequence of their own self-deception
projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets (scapegoats) while being apparently normal with everyone else
commonly hates with the pretense of love, for the purposes of self-deception as much as deception of others
abuses political (emotional) power ("the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion")
maintains a high level of respectability, and lies incessantly to do so
is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency (of destructiveness)
is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoating)
has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury
Most evil people realize the evil deep within themselves, but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection, or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character and personality disorder.
If this sounds familiar in relation to you-know-who, it should come as no surprise.
Malicious narcissism, you can say, the diagnosis that countless psychiatrists and psychologists have already given him. But as I said, I have a number of reservations about the complex issue of Evil, because I believe that there may be ways of thinking about it that are more fruitful than the label 'Evil'.
Whatever you want to call it, it seems clear to me that he-who-shall-not-be-named is protecting a particularly deep wound from authentic feeling and introspection, and that, as Scott Peck puts it, he “is aware of the evil deep within himself, but is unable to endure the pain of introspection.”
He is not alone in this: this inability to introspect and the 'militant unawareness' is perhaps a characteristic of our 'civilization' as a whole at this point, and in that sense, you-know-who reflects the collective wound in the world. He is not just here and now by accident, and as long as we fail to see that, we will not be able to see him dissolve in a fiery display of smoke or shatter him into a million evaporating pieces like that other you-know-who, in the final episode of the Potter saga. He will always come back, in a different form if necessary, or in a different person, as long as we don't see what he is reflecting to us like a mirror. Like a thorn in our side, a louse in our hair, an annoying itch that no amount of scratching can relieve, he will torment us until we do see it.
In the Potter saga, the name of he-who-must-not-be-named was avoided out of fear. I suggest we do so not out of fear, but out of lucidity and courage. From a kind of intuition about where the real problem lies, which ultimately is not with him. This also requires us to examine ourselves to see what he-who-shall-not-be-named reflects of our own shadow. It requires us to no longer take our superior position and send our judgment out into the world based on the idea that we ourselves are above this kind of energy. It requires us to subject our own shadow to merciless scrutiny, and that is one of the most difficult things there is. It requires us to dare to look at our own forms of unconsciousness, whether militant or not, with more sustained attention than we are used to. It requires us to dare to poke our finger into our own wound and feel what is stirring there.
Some more synchronicity: just two days ago, I listened to an episode of the podcast by Bernard Beitman, the renowned psychiatrist and former head of the psychiatry department at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who has been researching the phenomenon of... synchronicity for decades. In this episode, he interviewed Dr. Philip Merry, another scientist who has been extremely passionate about this phenomenon his entire life and is reportedly the only person in the world with a doctorate in synchronicity and leadership. When the conversation turned to he-who-shall-not-be-named, neither of them used his name. Philip Merry referred to him only as “your new president,” and Bernie Beitman, if I remember correctly, did not mention his name once either. It did not seem prearranged, and it felt very natural and spontaneous somehow. The name was not mentioned once. And of course, I noticed that, as I was already busy mentally formulating the first sentences of this essay. And it must be said: the absence of the name was powerful. Not giving in to the sucking vortex of this black hole, not feeding the energy of this singularity that wants to swallow everything in its vicinity and grind it into nothing but more blackness and darkness. Not naming this grand master of militant unawareness. It really made him smaller, and that is what we need, but that does not absolve us of the necessity or even the duty to investigate what he-who-shall-not-be-named holds up to us, and what resonates in our own shadows with this energy. I found it an example of synchronicity, this podcast about synchronicity that confirms my suspicion just as this text began to take shape in my mind. More on the phenomenon of synchronicity in future posts, by the way, because it raises a lot of questions about who or what we actually are. You will also hear more about Bernie Beitman's podcast in the future, as I will be sharing a number of interviews from that podcast in upcoming musings.
In this sense, none of this is really about politics. In fact, you-know-who isn't even a politician. Apart from a few simple slogans, he has no ideas and no vision except to feed his own delusions of grandeur and protect his own wounds. However, in his circle we do find politicians who unscrupulously exploit his energy, something that could well come back to haunt them, because you can't mess with a 'black hole', and the idea that you can control it is a delusion. The black hole has no interest whatsoever in what it swallows up, and anything that comes too close could suffer the same fate.
There seems to me to be a big difference between you-know-who and the people who surround him in his administration. Many of them have a specific agenda that has been in the making for a long time. One aspect of that agenda is 'Project 2025', an ultra-conservative project that aims to transform the US into a kind of autocratic and even theocratic (br)oligarchy. The amazing thing is that it is not even being done covertly: the contents of Project 2025 were widely known long before the elections. But it is not the project of you-know-who. I can imagine that he sympathizes with many of the points in that project, but it is not his creation and it is others who are using you-know-who to realize that agenda. I don't want to mention this to suggest that you-know-who is an innocent puppet in the hands of shrewd people who thelmselves are indeed politicians. Rather, he is a completely different kind of creature than the members of his administration. And his energy cannot be traced back to a clear and unambiguous conservative (or fascist) ideology. He is not an ideologue, unless you want to call boundless narcissism and militant unawareness an ideology. His energy seems to me to be about something else, and the people who have been using you-know-who for a decade to realize their agenda would probably not be able to sell that agenda without the hypnotic energy of you-know-who. And the energy is hypnotic because it touches something that remains under the radar of the media and political discourse. It certainly has to do with aspects that we can grasp within our usual terms: economic disparity, inequality, the ravages of four decades of neoliberalism, the growing underclass that has no prospect of a future without uncertainty, deprivation, and the accompanying social malaise, and so on. The same dynamics that are also causing the rise of the far right elsewhere. But I won't go into that now, because those analyses have already been made by others.
I would suggest that we may need to look further, because that social misery in itself does not provide a rationally explainable reason for the social dynamics we are now seeing unfold and intensify. After all, you-know-who only helped the rich during his previous term in office, and the majority of people who voted for him never benefited from it in any way, quite the contrary. It is a mystery that was already becoming apparent during the Reagan era. When a journalist asked the well-known sociologist Francis Fukuyama, author of 'The End of History', how to explain why so many people vote for figures or parties that only push them further into misery, Fukuyama was unable to answer. “I don't know,” was his short, slightly desperate but at least honest answer. I understand his bewilderment, because I shared it for a long time. Now I think that we should not look for the answer in the realm of reason, but rather in the realm of myth and the primal energies that largely influence our actions and behavior unconsciously. We like to think that we are rational beings, but I agree with others that this is not the case at all.
I now believe that we should look for the answer in a kind of process that takes place at a level much deeper than that of politics, sociology, economics, or (Western) psychology.
I think the success of you-know-who has to do with the aforementioned reflection of a collective wound that is only partly related to the aforementioned economic disadvantage of mainly white, low-schooled segments of American society. In my opinion, reflecting and reinforcing the collective wound also has to do with what artist, philosopher, and author Paul Levy describes in his book 'Dispelling Wetico'.
From the book description:
"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.
An inner cancer of the soul, wetiko flavors and manages our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Not constrained by the conventional laws of third-dimensional space and time, this ‘bug’ in the system deceives us by working with the intrinsic projective tendencies of our mind so as to appear external to and other than ourselves, utilizing the seemingly outside world as the canvas for its full-bodied revelation of itself.
Wetiko nonlocally in-forms, gives shape to and configures events in the world so as to synchronistically express itself, which is to say that just like in a dream, events in the outer world are symbolically reflecting a condition deep within the psyche of humanity.
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 a revelation as well as its own antidote, which once recognized can help us wake up and bring sanity back to our society. How wetiko manifests─will it destroy our species, or will it catalyze a deeper process of global awakening?─depends upon recognizing what it is revealing to us about ourselves."
I think this excerpt sums it up perfectly: a collective disease is rampant throughout our world and our 'civilization', and in order to ward off this disease, we will need to do what he-who-shall-not-be-named manifestly will not do, and what he does not want anyone else to do: examine our own shadow.
For we must face the possibility that what manifests itself in he-who-shall-not-be-named represents an energy that is against life itself, and ultimately wants to see that life destroyed. That would rather see the entire planet destroyed than feel its own wound, and would rather drag everything and everyone down with it than see the truth about itself.
This is a possibility that George Monbiot also explored in his recent text 'Fossil Record': that the oligarchs, whether consciously or unconsciously, are striving for the destruction of everything, of the entire biosphere, while escaping to Mars in their delusional self-aggrandizing mania.
I don't always agree with Monbiot's views, especially when it comes to agriculture or energy. But in this text, he touches on something that we generally overlook, or dare not see: the intrinsic apocalyptic destructiveness of you-know-who, and by extension of the oligarchs who seem determined to burn our living planet to a pile of ashes. Something that Naomi Klein also talked about in her recent text on 'End Times fascism'.
It is a possibility that American philosopher Norman O. Brown already suggested in the 1950s, in his masterpiece 'Life Against Death'. In this book, he argued that humanity unconsciously strives for self-destruction, something that is not so difficult to believe when you consider the world's turmoil and misery in this century and the last. I will not go into detail here about reasons Brown sums up for this tendency toward self-destruction, because 'Life Against Death' is a highly complex work with far-reaching explorations of our collective unconscious, a book that is very eccentric and demands a lot from the reader. But there are similarities with the concept of Wetico: Brown also sees humans as a species that is 'sick' and lives in deep dissatisfaction with itself.
In Native American cosmology, Wetico is a kind of collective psychosis that arises because a large part of our psychic energies and contents remain outside our own field of vision. This psychosis operates on “demonic, archetypal, and magical levels in our consciousness” and can only be addressed on those levels. That is why no “rational” arguments have had any effect on the success of he-who-shall-not-be-named: that success is the result of an irrational process and a collective psychosis. It is a symptom of a collective unwillingness to examine our own wounds and the need to continue projecting those wounds onto others.
If you-know-who is a manifestation of Wetico, he is certainly not the only one. By extension, many of the people in his entourage also seem to be affected by (self-)destructive tendencies. And I would certainly not argue that this disease is exclusive to the Republican Party: the entire system of “electoral oligarchy” that exists in Western countries, a system that we wrongly call “democracy” but which is still far preferable to a truly authoritarian state or a dictatorship, can, together with capitalism, to which it is so closely linked, perhaps be considered an expression of Wetico. The world has been sick for a long time, long before you-know-who became president. And many extremely destructive processes that are now manifesting themselves, reaching new levels of cruelty, senselessness, and contempt for life, seem to point toward an intensifying phase in Wetico, a new phase that seems to suggest the destruction of life as a possibility. The genocide in Gaza, which is happening with the consent and daily support of most Western industrialized countries, is an obvious example, as is the senseless slaughter in Ukraine, now entering its fourth year, or the boundless cruelty of the conflicts in Sudan and Congo. The pertinent inability or unwillingness to take any meaningful action to prevent the impending collapse of ecosystems and to save the living biosphere of this planet, our only home, from destruction and preserve it for future generations and for all life with which we share this planet, can also be seen as another manifestation of Wetico.
'Dispelling Wetico' is one of the books in my 'to read' pile. I have already skimmed through it and marked some sentences and chapters that caught my attention. Mindful of synchronicity, I now intuitively opened the book at a number of pages and found particularly enlightening passages every time. It's a process I often use these days. Since I don't have the time to actually read all the books in my 'to read' pile from cover to cover, I rely in part on the phenomenon of synchronicity to guide me to the information I need at any given moment.
I will now share some of these excerpts, because I believe they point to an important way of dealing with this phenomenon of Wetico, the phenomenon of the apparent destructiveness of the militant unawareness of you-know-who, which threatens to drag everything and everyone down with it. And the excerpts also point to hope, and to the need for all of us to wake up and take up the challenge:
"Wetiko disease is not an expression of the personal unconscious, though it expresses itself through individuals in unique ways; rather, it is a sickness of the soul that is an expression of a disturbance in the collective unconscious itself. Full-blown wetikos have fallen into, been taken over by, and been seized by the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious, a more powerful energy that is acting itself out through them. When an archetype common to all people comes to life, it has a power that fascinates people from within, as it is the power of the collective unconscious which is activated. When an archetype is activated, it gets us below the belt and not in our mind. It is our sympathetic nervous system that is gripped, so that rational logic and facts have little effect. When an archetype within us is mobilized, it affects us like a narcotic, having a peculiar hypnotic effect which renders us unconscious. The image of Dorothy and her friends falling asleep in the poppy field as they approach the Emerald City in the movie The Wizard of Oz symbolically expresses this archetypical situation of falling under a spell as we approach the sacred archetypal dimension.” (p.60)
"Much to our advantage, spiritual alarm clocks, natural stimulators of lucid awareness, spontaneously precipitate into and out of the dreamlike nature of the universe reflecting, expressing, and revealing the totalitarian psychosis called wetiko. This is to say that at the same time that wetiko is destroying us, it is simultaneously -potentially- waking us up. Everything depends upon if we recognize what is being revealed to us, and how we respond. The choice is truly ours.
We capture within ourselves and truly "see" the nature of wetiko disease-"Vampire/Cannibal Psychosis" when we realize that, just like in a dream, its full-bodied manifestation in the world theater is a reflection of a process going on deep within our very soul. We are all dreaming up the wetiko epidemic together. Seeing through our experience in this way gives world events a certain transparency, as well as rendering us transparent to ourselves. Seeing through ourselves, and having borne the dark side of ourselves, we are no longer delivered up to the darkness to the same degree. This intimacy with ourselves enables us to step into and embody a role in the field of being like "psychic T-cells" that help to heal the malignant cancer in the collective body politic of the world soul.” (p.177)
"Wetiko is like a psychic Nautilus machine that is continually "working" us. This is similar to the way the forces of Mara, the Evil One, who attacked the soon-to-be-enlightened Buddha as he was meditating under the Bodhi tree, were actually a secret ally to Buddha, for Buddha wouldn't have developed the muscle of realization without Mara's challenge. Seen as a dream character in Buddha's dream, Mara was an aspect of Buddha's own consciousness that was dreamed up to play out this very unpopular, adversarial role so as to help Buddha become illumined. In a similar way, humanity's highest virtues are called upon when confronted by evil. If the obstacles presented by wetiko didn't exist, they would have to be created intentionally and invented, because it is by overcoming obstacles that we develop the higher qualities that we need. If we place a seed in the palm of our hand, for example, it doesn't grow, but when that same seed is buried underground, it is inspired by the soil's resistance to grow toward the light and actualize its potential. Encoded within the evil of the wetiko virus is its own psychic vaccine, a potential inoculation against our own ignorance and laziness, which if not overcome, will overcome us. The wetiko bug's existence requires us to strengthen our muscle of discern- ment, lest we get "taken" for all we are worth. The virus demands that we cultivate impeccability within ourselves, or we don't stand a chance. Wetiko tests us so as to make sure that we will make optimal use of our divine endowment. Wetiko literally demands that we step into our power and become resistant to its oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free, or else! Instead of a typical virus mutating so as to become resistant to our attempts to heal it, the wetiko virus forces us to mutate relative to it. It is as though the evil of wetiko is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence. This higher power, through the revelation and understanding of wetiko, connects us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves. The wetiko bug is the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known as well as not known to humanity." (p.261-262)
As we all know, bad things can unexpectedly have positive consequences. And salvation can be near when the need is greatest. I don't think I'm the only one who believes that even the seemingly irrational destructiveness of he-who-shall-not-be-named can, in a way we cannot yet see, also have good consequences. It can hardly be otherwise. But as Paul Levy says, it will depend on us, on the choices we make in how we respond to you-know-who and his entourage, and to other manifestations of the apparent disease afflicting the world. The evil, or the disease, or the virus, may be an invitation to examine our own shadows with more sustained attention than we are used to, to step out of our “comfort zone” and take personal responsibility for creating a “more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible,” as philosopher Charles Eisenstein calls it in the book of the same name.
When we see the negative energy, the destructive force, the senseless cruelty of Wetico at work in people like you-know-who, or in other figures, institutions, and processes, it should not make us despondent, but rather wake us up and encourage us to give everything we have to become the “anti-virus” ourselves and take responsibility for a better world. But to do that, it is not enough to just be angry, to curse and shout at him whose name I will not mention. Rather, it is an invitation to subject our own shadow to close scrutiny and to feel which part of us (consciously or unconsciously) resonates with the energy of he-who-shall-not-be-named.
It is also necessary to remain outside the pull of the vortex of the name of you-know-who and not feed the forces of his militant unawareness by giving it more attention. Yes, we must protest, demonstrate, make ourselves heard, not only in relation to you-know-who, but also in response to similar processes taking place in Europe and elsewhere in the world. We are all called to become “activists,” a word I don't like but am using for convenience's sake. But we must do so not out of hatred or anger, but out of love for life and love for the wonder of this planet, the only one we call home. Let us avoid the deadly attraction of the black hole that is the (un)consciousness of he-who-shall-not-be-named and aim our arrows at the larger system that is devouring our planet, of which he is but one manifestation. An unconscious manifestation, which nevertheless hypnotizes countless people and drags them into the illness and into the trap of the black hole. Each of us can be part of creating a different, more beautiful world, and let you-know-who be the final “wake-up call,” the catalyst that awakens us all and allows us to step into our full potential.
Spread the word!
Namaste.
