Paul Levy Quotes

Instead of focusing on isolated objects and events, we can expand our fixed perspective and allow the deeper process (often taking the form of a mythic narrative of some sort) that is animating events to reveal itself. Instead of superimposing our limiting ideas and beliefs onto the waking dream, we can allow life to show its dreamlike nature to us.

Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language.

Wetiko doesn't objectively exist, and yet, at the same time, it is not merely our projection or imagination. Instead of an either/or universe, where phenomena like wetiko are either real or unreal, there is an area in between in which it is both/and--both real and unreal at the same time.

In order for our minds to comprehend something, there must be an appropriately structured neural structure called a 'frame' that makes it possible to contextualize, make proper sense of, and mentally 'see' the thing. Our understanding of the world is frame dependent: frames are the accessories with which we think. Frames are the cognitive, conceptual structures that enable us to put together, amplify, and activate ideas. When truth is unseen it is because it is both unframed and unnamed; frames and names go together.

Like a fractal, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously--intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (among ourselves), collectively (as a species), as well as trans-personally (in a realm beyond our personal selves). Those afflicted with wetiko consume, like a cannibal, the life force of others--human and nonhuman--for private purposes or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives.

There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us.

Indigenous people have been tracking the same 'psychic virus' for many centuries, calling it 'wetiko' in Cree (windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan), a term that refers to a biologically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others by means of evil acts.

The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.