Born in 1956, Paul Levy graduated with degrees in art and economics and has had a lifelong intense interest in the work of C. G. Jung. As a result of an intense personal trauma in 1981, he began a process of spiritual awakening that led him on a 'shamanic descent' and a quest to understand the fundamental nature of reality.
Paul is the author of:
The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis and
Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of EvilIn his books Paul explores and explains that we 'disown' our innermost, drarkest thoughts and feelings and project them outwards onto others and the world, a process he compares to the Native American Indian concept of "wetiko". Paul has stated that "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 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."
Running Time: 01:48:00
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Here's the transcript:Niall: Hello and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio. I am Niall Bradley. Your co-host this evening, Joe Quinn.
Joe: Hi there.
Niall: And we are joined tonight by Jason Martin.
Jason: Hello.
Niall: And Laura.
Laura: Hi.
Joe: Laura Knight-Jadczyk,
Niall: Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
Joe: Just to be formal.
Laura: He assumes everybody knows who I am.
Joe: Well you never know!
Laura: I don't think that that's the case.
[Laughter]
Niall: Well now, the topic of today's show is the 'Wetiko Virus' and Collective Psychosis. We are interviewing a very special guest, Paul Levy. Paul is an author of a couple of books that we are going to be discussing today. He graduated with degrees in art and economics and has had a lifelong interest in the work of Carl Jung. As a result of a personal trauma in 1981, he began a process of spiritual awakening that led him on a 'shamanic descent' and a quest to understand the fundamental nature of reality.
Paul is the author of two books: The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, as well as Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. You will also find more of his work on his website: Realitysandwich.com. Now in his books, Paul explains that we disown our innermost darkest thoughts and feelings and project them outwards onto others and the world, a process he compares to the native American Indian concept of 'Wetiko'. More on that in a minute.
To give you an idea of where we are going to go in today's show, I am going to quote something Paul has written:
"There is a contagious psycho-spiritual 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 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."
So, a very warm welcome to Paul Levy!
Laura: Hi Paul!
Paul: Hi. Yeah, I am just so happy to be here so I really appreciate you guys' invite, so thank you.
Joe: You're welcome.
Laura: Can I just jump off of something that Niall just read, where you are talking about this collective psychosis of titanic proportions? Would you say that it's kind of really getting bad out there right now? That we are really projecting our 'shadow self' onto Russia and creating a situation that is just absolutely volatile? It's like a powder-keg just waiting to go off over there.
Paul: Yeah. I would agree that the collective psychosis, it just seems like as time unfolds, it just gets more and more intense. And from the dreaming point of view and what I mean when I say that is you can contemplate what's happening in the world as if it's a dream, like at night when we have a dream, we can contemplate it and understand it in a symbolic way. When darkness more and more manifests, and evil really becomes just more and more apparent, from the dreaming point of view, that's an expression that there is light that's nearby because you can't have a shadow without a light. That's the projector of the shadow.
So things seem really, really bad and increasingly bad as time unfolds. And yet, from this other point of view, it's an expression that some deeper light is kind of coming out and making all the shadows that typically hide in the corners or hide underground become able to be seen.
So we are in the middle of a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. And part of the madness is that very few people are even talking about it, as if it's just like this normal situation, like the fact that we are in this continual war and we are killing each other and there are just like school shootings seemingly every week. That's just like this normal thing that people have accepted. That's just what we do. And that itself, that meme, that thought form itself is crazy.
And one of the other aspects of the psychosis is that it's clear that what's playing out in the world is this evil energy. And I'm not just talking personal evil but archetypal evil. And in so many areas of discourse, you can't even mention the word 'evil'. It's a taboo word. And people who are identified with being spiritual practitioners, 'Oh, I don't want to invest my psychic attention, my energy, into contemplating something like evil!' But what they don't realise is that by having that avoidance they are unwittingly feeding it. So there are many, many ways that the collective psychosis plays out. And the indigenous people had the word the 'Wetiko' virus, which is like this mind-virus because it operates through the unconscious and through the parts of us that have this blind-spot. So it really connotes the spirit of evil in indigenous culture.
So what I've tried to do with my book is I've tried to translate what they are pointing at, because they're pointing at something with reference to this evil spirit that operates through the way we actually project via our unconscious onto the waking inkblot. And then actually create experience for ourselves in a way where we don't have the understanding that we're actually just reacting to our own mind. So it becomes like a feedback loop where we just play out our unconscious and because we are doing it without awareness, it's always in this destructive way.
And so that's what my whole work is trying to shed light on, is that particular sort of energetic signature that we are all a part of, that we all act out. And the thing which is interesting, if I can just say a bit more about it because it is so interesting, the thing about the Wetiko virus is that its source is inside of us, inside of our psyche, and yet it collapses. There is like this seeming edge between the inner and the outer world. But the 'Wetiko' virus collapses that boundary between the inner and the outer in such a way that it seemingly extends itself into the outer world, seemingly configuring events in the outer world so as to express our inner situation.
So what I just described where what's happening in the outer, greater body politic is actually a reflection of what's happening inside of our psyche, that also is this way of describing when you have a dream. Because what is a dream? But it's just a reflection of the mind that is actually the dreamer.
Laura: But -
Paul: And so the point - okay, go ahead.
Laura: Go ahead.
Paul: Yeah.
Laura: I was just going to say -
Paul: Well, I was going to say -
[Laughter]
Paul: Okay, so I was just going to say, the thing about Wetiko - so it is the source of the greatest evil that we are playing out both on the individual dimension, where we actually act self-destructively and act out an addiction or any sort of behaviour, just our own self, but it is also the root of the evil interpersonally and also collectively, what's playing out in the greater body politic.
But encoded in Wetiko, in the evil, it's actually helping us to wake up. It's actually helping us to realise the dream-like nature. So it's like encoded in the evil is this blessing, this gift. But how it manifests, it's a very quantum situation in that both states are superposed together. Just like light, is it a wave or a particle? Well, it depends, how do you observe it? The same thing with Wetiko. Is it going to destroy us or is it going to help us to wake up? Well, it depends on if we have the recognition of what it is actually reflecting back to us.
Laura: Okay. I have two quick things I want to say. First of all, I really appreciate you saying that this is a blessing because for us, our own discovery of and research into the problem of psychopathy and the nature of evil in that respect, was a real blessing. It was just tremendous. In the beginning, yes, we suffered but the thing was that we learned so much. And what we learned was what is out there, how it can get to us through our own gaps in consciousness, or our own gaps in awareness, and by failing to understand what our own make-up is like. And beginning also to work on ourselves so that those things weren't manifested in us either.
So that's the first thing. But the second thing is that what you are saying reminds me kind of Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With The Wolves, where she talks about the 'dark-man dream'. You have that and it's kind of like a warning that you are in danger because your awareness is not up to par, you're sleeping with the enemy, so to say. And that enemy can be your own behaviour, it can be your own attitude, it can be your own refusal to look at what you do or how you participate in the perpetuation of evil by not pointing it out, not naming it and not doing whatever you can to alleviate or ameliorate it.
So in a certain sense, what we are having is just like a grand scale 'dark-man dream' only instead of it being on the inside, it's now on the outside.
Paul: Yeah. And if I could say one thing about what you just said Laura, because you are so right on. Like, this sleeping with the enemy, basically another way of saying that is like you are in bed with the enemy. And being in bed in the enemy is to be complicit. And that's where we begin to sort of disengage from unwittingly being agents of this evil, is when we have the realisation of our own complicity in it.
Laura: And complicity, I think, is a really big thing. I just read Gustave Le Bon's book The Crowd, and I highly recommend it. It's 129 pages, you'll love it. And he talks about this sort of thing, about the subconscious ruling a crowd or a group and in a way it relates to what's-her-face and her idea of limbic resonance. Who is it? Martha Stout.
Niall: Martha Stout.
Laura: Yeah. Martha Stout and her idea of limbic resonance, how people can be terrified and turned into like an animalistic-crowd behaviour. But in any event, this whole thing is like we as a people are not looking at how complicit we are in allowing things to happen and we are not aware that we really do have the rulers we deserve.
Paul: Yeah, no, that's true. And the thing about this being a collective psychosis is that - and I go into this in my book - because when you inquire into what is the nature of this Wetiko virus and you realise, well, it doesn't exist in an objective independent way separate from our own minds.
Laura: Yeah.
Paul: And one implication of that is that we are all dreaming it up together. So what is happening on the world stage, we are all co-dreaming it together. It's a reflection of something in us that is unconscious.
You see, the thing about Wetiko, because there are all these ways I can describe it, it's a form of this like psychic being blind. It is like this blindness that actually believes that it's sighted. And not only does it believe that it's sighted, but arrogantly it believes that it is more sighted than you or anyone else.
So what happens is that, intrinsic to our nature, we have this genius for creating reality. We create our experience moment by moment. But the Wetiko virus in a sense hooks into that genius that we all have and it turns it against ourselves. So we actually unwittingly create reality in a way that isn't serving us and then we react to it as if we have nothing to do with invoking it, as if it is objective and separate. Then we just get caught in this infinitely self-perpetuating feedback loop where we react to our own projections. And that's a way of describing what Wetiko is.
Laura: There is another comparison, what they call poltergeist phenomena. Poltergeist phenomena has been studied fairly extensively and in every case it's a woman or an adolescent with suppressed or turbulent emotional energies that they are not allowed to express, they are not allowed to look at them. They are not allowed to acknowledge them. And then things begin to happen around them, things move, fly through the air, fires start, water runs, all kinds of strange things happen.
And they act as though it has nothing to do with them and yet, in every single case that I have ever studied, it turns out that there is somebody who has some kind of deep psychological repression and that this energy is being utilised, or it is being expressed outside of them because they cannot express inside. And so on a very grand scale, this is what we are doing!
Paul: Yeah, no, totally. What you are describing, what I was saying before about Wetiko, its source is inside of the psyche yet all of a sudden it is able to synchronistically, in a sense, dissolve the boundary between the inner and the outer and seemingly configure events in the world so as to express itself through the medium of the outside world and it's actually expressing an inner situation. And what that points at, in physics they talk about that what's really important is the field, the non-local field, and the fact that it's not constrained by third dimensional space and time. So when there is an energy that we are not really engaging with, what happens? It then takes us over through our blind-spot.
You see, the thing about the Wetiko, it's this archetypal energy. It's trans-personal. It's greater than just the human ego. So actually, the way it operates is that it will literally possess us and we unwittingly become the instrument for it to incarnate itself. And then we play it out, we embody it in the world.
How I first began to see it was in my family. And I began to realise, 'Oh my god, the family system, the field, was actually playing out some things', like this shadow element. And the more I began to point at the shadowy element, the more different parts of the family system got enlisted into being its agent. And I couldn't believe - it was very sci-fi - but I was beginning to have the realisation, 'Oh my god, there is a deeper, non-local field that's informing what's playing out in our world.' So that's one of the first steps of being able to see this higher dimensional disease, Wetiko.
Laura: Yeah. We call it kind of the cryptogeographic being because it is amazing the way it can erupt here and there. The minute you start seeing it, it's like the whole system acts to try to suppress you or to re-blind you. It's just amazing.
Paul: Exactly, exactly, it will protect the abuser.
Laura: Yeah.
Paul: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. That's so psychedelic when I began to realise that. And it's almost like built into the field when then darkness manifests, and somebody sees it and tries to shed light on it, they become seen as the demon or they become seen as the bad guy, or the field will conspire to shut them down or something like that.
Laura: Yeah.
Paul: So you have to factor that into your equation to how do you respond.
Laura: Yeah, it's a crazy thing. Did you see the movie Fast Runner?
Paul: No, I haven't.
Laura: Well, it's a movie about, I guess you'd call them native North American.
Niall: Inuit.
Laura: Inuit. It's an astonishing movie. But it's basically it's about this very thing. It's a very small tribe and the 'virus' gets introduced into the small tribe. And it shows how it spreads and almost destroys the lives of the entire tribe. And then it shows how they deal with it. It's a fascinating, fascinating movie. If you like scenery that is all white. Two hours of nothing but white. [Laughter]
Paul: Right, right.
Laura: Then it's a great movie.
Paul: Okay cool. That, see, this brings up - what I am trying to do to is create this map so people can actually have the recognition of this evil that I am pointing at. Because this Wetiko - and that's just one word, every tradition has different words for it - it's pointing at the same thing. But the thing about this evil energy is that it can't stand to be seen.
Laura: Right.
Paul: Because when you see it, you take away it's power. And not only do you take away it's power, but you simultaneously empower yourself.
So the thing, if I can just describe one of its qualities, is that it's this shape-shifting bug. And what it will do, it moment by moment shape-shifts and it will assume your form. In other words, it's actually like you will have a thought. But it's actually not even your thought but it'll appear as if you are thinking something or you have a belief or you have a perception. And if you are not aware of that, "Oh wow, this isn't actually how I feel or what I'm thinking," if you are not aware of that, you are going to identify with that thought and you are going to just absorb into it and take it on. And then what's happened is that Wetiko energy, has in a sense put you on. And putting you on has a double meaning, of putting you on like a suit of clothes and also putting you on means to fool you.
So it has assumed your form. The next thing you know, you've identified with it. The next thing that you don't know is that you are taken over by it and you are unwittingly an instrument. You're a secret agent and your secret is even secret to yourself because you now are a conduit for this higher dimensional bug to play itself out in our world. And that's one of the way it works.
Laura: Absolutely. It's scary, and you've just described what this Le Bon guy describes, how people begin to act when they get this infection in crowd behaviour. It's really astonishing.
Paul: Yes, so I'm going to get that book. I actually wrote down that I need to get The Crowd just because I am not familiar with that.
Joe: It's available for free online actually if you just search Google for it.
Paul: Oh beautiful!
Laura: Yeah, it's an old book.
Joe: It's an old book, yeah.
Laura: Forgive him for some of his archaic ideas such as things like women don't have the capacity to think like men do. But just ignore that.
Paul: Right. I'll just ignore that.
Laura: Consider the time he was writing and just read the rest.
Niall: Yeah. That was the 'Victorian era Wetiko'.
Paul: Right. So the thing about the Wetiko is that it has travelled through multi-generations throughout time. And it's manifested in all cultures.
Laura: Oh yeah. So can you give us some practical, real life examples? Describe a situation you are familiar with and some of the dynamic of how it would appear, just in kind of a practical way? Because we all tend to get symbolic in our language. And I am the practical mystic. [Laughter]
Paul: Yeah. Sure, this might be a good place for me to just even create context for how I discovered it in my own life, this Wetiko I write about.
Laura: Yeah.
Jason: Yep.
Paul: So I am an only child and it wound up - I didn't realise this at the time - but it wound up that my father was really, really sick and that he was a psychopath, he was. He was a criminal. But he wasn't - there was a secret, a family secret. I could go into delicate stories but I'm not going to that. It's kind of horrifying.
But what happened, on the surface, he seemed to be a normal, good person and all that. But as a sensitive kid, like we all are, I was sensing there was this real darkness that was coming through him. And particularly, because here I was the only child who was really, very bright and good at school and accomplished and a happy kid and he was so identified unconsciously with me, to the point where when I began to separate, it would just throw him into absolute murderous, demonic rages, having heart attacks, telling me I was killing him, just over-the-top stuff to the point where I got sick. After the worse of the episodes, I got a fever the very next day for a year. And they couldn't find anything physically that was the matter.
And then at the end of that year, that entity that had taken over my father, that raging, blaming, hateful energy was now all of a sudden, much to my horror, it was living inside of my psyche. And it was getting conciliated at any impulse I had towards just being myself. So what I am describing is that I was actually traumatised and I was like recreating the external trauma but that now was happening in my mind.
So to answer your question, I was trying to express as best as I could to my mother, to my friends, to the relatives and then I began going to therapists. And then I had a whole awakening that got me hospitalised and thrown in mental hospitals. And I was trying to describe on the one hand that I was having this spiritual awakening and I was realising, 'Well, we are all co-dreaming and this is a dream. And we can help each other to wake up.'
And not only was that not understood but then everybody protected my father, including my mother, the relatives, my friends, his friends, the psychiatrist. And so, to answer your question about, well, how does it manifest? Give us a practical example. Here I was actually, as I was just awakening to just my own nature, I was beginning to realise 'Oh my god, this dynamic -' that I just was describing just a little bit - 'this is what's playing out in the world'. I was in my mid-twenties, I hadn't developed the skilfulness to really articulate what I was seeing in a way that wasn't getting me in trouble because as I was more and more trying to point at the shadow and the evil and the darkness that was playing out, and that people were colluding in it through their unconscious, as I was doing that, the more and more I was being seen as I was the one who was crazy.
So what I am describing, I imagine maybe some of our listeners might be able to relate to. Because I'm not the only one who has had experiences like this. We all kind of do. So part of it is you create a container in yourself and also with other people to the point where you develop a way of just being in communication and having relationship. It's almost like creating a way of speaking where you are invoking like this meta-awareness. But that's a whole deeper discussion. But I'm just curious if this is all getting through, what I am trying to say because it almost killed me.
Between '81 and '82, I was thrown in mental hospitals maybe four or five times. I was always guaranteed by the doctors that I had a chemical imbalance, that I was mentally ill, that I would need to be on medication for the rest of my life. And here, I haven't been on medication for like thirty-five years or something like that, with no episodes or anything like that.
So I quickly extricated myself from that situation. And just, very thankfully, met my teachers and continued my awakening and then wrote my books. But I think so many people who are actually institutionalised in psychiatric hospitals are actually having some form of shamanic initiation or spiritual awakening but from the consensus reality point of view, they are not seen in that way. And they are just pathologised and medicated. And it is really tragic what can happen.
Laura: I think maybe another way to describe it would be say, in a marriage, say, a woman or a man and it could be either way, one partner puts unreasonable expectations on the other and they are not really spoken but they're there. They are like the atmosphere, like the field as you describe it.
And then the other partner can't come up to those expectations. And then is condemned by looks or subtle degradation or even angry reactions and so forth. And then that person who is having this done to them - it's kind of like gaslighting, what I am trying to say. It's like gaslighting.
And then that person becomes crazier and crazier and crazier, just like the woman in the movie Gaslight. And then they end up, as you say, getting locked up in a mental institution because they know something is going on, something is being done to them but it's done in such a way that other people think that other people think that just normal things are going on and that they're the one who is going crazy.
Paul: Right. No, that's totally true. That's totally true. And then, what that brings up for me, the psychological underlying process that underlies this whole, what the indigenous people call the Wetiko Virus, is like projecting of the shadow. And one way of really understanding that - so say we disassociate from the darker part of ourselves. And so then what do we do? It gets thrown outside of us. It gets projected outside. But then what I point at in my work is that this reality is very much like a dream. So think about it. If you are in a dream, and if you then disconnect from an energy in yourself in the dream, it gets projected out into the dream. And what is the dream but just an actual reflection of your own mind?
So into the dream will immediately come somebody who is carrying and embodying that particular split-off shadow that you have just projected out. And if you think about it, all of a sudden, oh, now you have evidence that the shadow really is out there because it is seemingly outside of yourself.
So that entrenches you even more in your point of view, that the shadow is outside of yourself. So then you now have a hook and you have more proof that to actually see the shadow outside of yourself and the more you see it outside of yourself, the more evidence the dream will supply to prove your point of view as correct in an infinitely self-creating feedback loop.
And what of course happens is that then you try to destroy and I'm talking in the ultimate sense, that person who is carrying that darkness because that's a reflection of your inner process of wanting to destroy your own darkness. So your inner process is actually playing out in the outer world. And by doing that, you have actually become possessed by the very darkness you are trying to destroy.
And that plays out on the world stage, it also plays out in marriages or in any relationship where we are not owning our own shadow. Yes, so you are totally right. And that's the psychological dynamic that underlies what we are talking about.
Laura: There's a guy - you know Gabor Mate, right?
Paul: Oh yes, totally.
Laura: Okay. So he's got a book called When the Body Says No. And he talks about the fact that people - it's along the very same line where you don't acknowledge that shadow inside you so you can't acknowledge your anger, you can't acknowledge your rejection of something because we are all brought up to be these perfect little children who are never angry. And you always smile even though you don't like something. And you accept this, you accept that, even though you really reject it. You're told, "Don't say that. That's not nice." And "Oh no, you can't dislike so and so because he's really a nice person." And of course, you as a kid may know that he's really a pervert.
But you are not allowed to say, you are not allowed to act in certain ways. And most of all you can't be angry at your parents for anything, even innocent things. So you suppress this and then of course, as you say, it ends up outside. But he talks about how people end up with terrible diseases, just as you were describing getting sick because you were suppressing. If your parent is acting a certain way and you don't feel like you can express your anger towards them, then you express it toward yourself or you get a disease or you get sick in some way. And then you begin acting in certain ways, as you just described.
So I think that maybe this thing that you are talking about, this shadow-self that people do not acknowledge - and it's going to bring us around here in a second to the global thing - is that they don't acknowledge that they have negative emotions. That they have anger, that they have needs that aren't being met. They are unable to ask for those needs to be met. They don't feel like they're worth having their needs met. They feel that if they get angry at their partner or their parents that they'll be abandoned. They have the fear of abandonment.
So they end up completely suppressing everything. And Gabor Mate says that if you learn how to appropriately feel, more than anything, it's feeling it. Feeling it, understand it, know that it's okay to be angry. Know that it's okay to express anger if you express it appropriately.
And you don't have to project - you don't have to go along and say, "Oh I'm perfect! I never feel angry. I'm holier than thou. I'm just the cat's meow and it's other people are doing all those things because I am holier than the Pope!"
And so what ends up happening is people end up getting sick. And that's kind of in a way, with the global situation - because, for example, Americans - the exceptionalism: "We are perfect, we are all about democracy. Everything that is about America is good and pure and perfect and so on and so forth. And everybody else and anybody else is somehow evil" because we are not allowed to say those thing.
Jason: I was going to say - I've been quiet so far because I've been really trying to listen hard. Because obviously the language of Mr. Levy is not quite the same as mine. So I'm trying to kind of get my head around it because I think you are saying something very important about this.
I think that actually, as I sit here and think about it, there is something really true about this idea that part of the problem, as Laura was saying, is people's inability to accept and cope with their own thing, their own problems. And that exceptionalism and projecting it out into the world is kind of in a certain sense at the core of humanity's problems because what prevents us from coming together is kind of a sense of righteousness and perfection in ourselves, which is totally delusional. We completely reject any part of ourselves that is not holy or good. And we prevent ourselves from ever coming together as the whole human race, because we are always sitting there and looking at people and saying, "Oh but they do this!" Or, "Oh but they do that!" Instead of realising that, "You know, we do bad stuff too." Americans they do bad stuff all the time. America's been doing bad stuff; they completely slaughtered the native Americans, stole all of their land.
We were watching this movie the other night about The Help. And it wasn't even fifty years ago or sixty years ago that African Americans were still basically slaves in the US. And now here we are sitting there acting as if we are a democracy and talking about what's going on in Russia. And, "Oh they do this!" And, "Oh they do that!" It's like, we still don't have room to talk there.
Paul: Yeah, no, totally. What you are saying too is like what I talk about in my book, is that we all, at any moment, can potentially fall prey to this Wetiko. Yeah, if somebody becomes fully and utterly enlightened - I don't even know what that means - then they're immune.
Laura: Me either.
Paul: Right. But the point being that it's really important to develop like self-reflective ability and the humbleness of realising - who among us hasn't unwittingly, with the best of intentions, unconsciously acted out their unconscious in a way that's been hurtful to themselves or to others? We all have. And when you have that understanding, all of a sudden that cuts through. You see, the point of view of saying, "Oh, they have Wetiko and we don't," that perspective is itself is an expression that you are under the spell of Wetiko because it feeds off of polarisation and separation.
So the point here is that we are all...
Jason: Yeah. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Paul: Right, exactly, exactly. We all have a shadow. And, like I was saying, that whole dynamic of projecting the shadow, that's the psychological dynamic that's underlying this whole process.
So the idea of having just the real deep understanding that, yeah, we all have potentiality to fall asleep and to unwittingly act out our darker impulses. We have an incredible ability to self-deceive. And to realise that, it's a mortifying realisation to catch yourself with your hand in the cookie jar of your own unconscious. But when you see that, it develops this humbleness. Then that opens up to that deeper place of the compassion where you have the realisation that ultimately we are all interconnected and interdependent. And that compassion, that's really like this medicine for dissolving the Wetiko virus.
Jason: Well, yeah, I've kind of noticed that kind of the foundational aspect of hypocrisy - at least political hypocrisy - is a total lack of humility and a realisation that 'we made mistakes in the past and so we need to be a little more diplomatic and understanding about things.' This whole situation that's going on with America and Russia - it takes on the kind of 'blaming-the-victim' type of situation basically, where they're sort of saying, in the context of Russia being that Russia was a victim of the United States and the capitalism in the early '90s and what they did to it. And now Russia is coming back and saying, "Hold on, you can't do this any more." And now they are saying, "Well, look how terrible they are!" And well, yeah, that's about the end of that thought.
Paul: Yeah.
Joe: Paul, I was just thinking there, in your book, like you have already mentioned, you make reference to this idea of projection,.projecting your own darkness out there. And this, for me, that kind of darkness isn't really something that we might think is synonymous with original sin and stuff.
But as far as I understand, that kind of a darkness is essentially just kind of hang-ups and issues, personal issues and programs, let's say. A lot of them, that come from childhood, where we are taught or forced, in some way, by our parents to disown a part of ourselves and to reject it. And to maybe even hate it because of this kind of early childhood programming. And then later, as you were saying, we project it onto others and hate it and condemn it in others. And you describe this as this Wetiko virus essentially.
But in other parts of your books you refer to Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan character and the idea of this predator. And you also kind of go to the point of suggesting that it's almost an external, almost independent kind of conscious entity.
And I'm wondering if there are two separate aspects of this Wetiko, if they are quite separate or if there is some kind of interplay between them?
Paul: Right. No, I appreciate that and that's a great question because I try to go into that in the book because if we just think, for example, that, "Oh, the Wetiko virus, this predator energy, it's just our projection, is just our imagination," then by holding that view point, we've fallen under its thrall. That's what it wants us to think, that it's not real.
But then, if we think it's real, then guess what? We have fallen under its thrall too because then we have invested it with reality that's unwarranted. So it's this real, in a sense, conundrum, in the sense that on the one hand, it's not just a projection of the mind. And on the other hand, it's not like objective, separate from us, like having an independent existence. It exists in this realm that's between the two, in the imaginal realm.
So it's the sort of thing where it has no reality, ultimately speaking, at all. And yet it can destroy our species. So how do you hold that? And the point is that similar to like in a dream, when you are in dream at night and there is this evil, monstrous, vampiric figure, yeah, you have to deal with in the relative dimension of the dream. You have to come to terms with that or that's going to kill you. But yet ultimately you can actually have the recognition that that's just your own energy, that that's just your own incredible power that you are disassociated from that's getting like thrown outside of yourself and, abracadabra, embodied in this seemingly other form.
And if you don't have the recognition that you are dreaming then you have to deal with it in a certain way. But once you recognise the nature of your situation in that dream, that figure is recognised to be just your own energy. And in Tibetan Buddhism, I do practice in that lineage, they'll talk about that's when you wake up.
So I'm trying to give a sense of the incredible slippery slope of trying to hold any of the opposite viewpoint of saying 'oh, it's objectively real', 'it's not objectively real'. No, they are both errors. There is sort of bardo realm that we live in that is really important to understand as a way of being able to engage with these energies.
Laura: It comes back to the example of the poltergeist. They can't exist without our energy but yet, in a certain sense, once that energy has left us, it's very real out there.
Paul: Yeah.
Joe: I think sometimes about the genesis of this - and virus is a very good term or analogy to use I think. Let's go back to Adam and Eve or the first human beings, or whatever, that were created. And they were the first set of parents that had children. If they were just fully psychologically healthy, normal, as humans are meant to be people, and they raised children who were perfectly normal, then none of this kind of Wetiko virus type stuff would ever have entered into this human race essentially.
But if you do start with that, if you somehow aere able to inject that at some point in time - I'm not talking about Adam and Eve here - but at some point in time, if you were able to inject that into a couple of people, say two parents, hypothetically or two parents who, for whatever reason, maybe we could talk about psychopathy here or some kind of deviation or aberration away from normal human psychology, then that would, in itself, would propagate naturally if you know what I mean. Say you have two evil parents, or even just one evil parent, who then raises his children to have this disowned part of themselves, who then engage in projecting their darkness outwards and causing further damage to their children and on down the line and it spreads out.
It seems to me almost like the way it could start would be to just have one seed entered or seeds that enter the human race at some point, and it would spread kind of organically. And it would get worse and worse over time.
Paul: Yeah, no, that's totally true. And that's an issue that I contemplate, is how did it start? And there are all these theories of all these extraterrestrials and there was some sort of trauma, or whatever. I don't reach any conclusion but what I point out is that the nature of our situation is that it is getting recreated moment by moment, in this moment and in this moment.
I'm just glad you brought up also the idea that once this Wetiko energy gets into, in a sense, the Petri dish of the family system, whether it's just even in one person's psyche, or in one of the parents, or in the human family, it tends to propagate. And it propagates through the unconscious blind-spot. And that's important to understand with like the whole idea of, like, you have a psychopath. And the psychopath can't do much harm when it's just themselves. But when the field actually doesn't recognise their psychopathology, it will organise itself in a way to protect their illness, their evil and it will collude with the psychopath.
An example, just think about like in World War II, with Hitler. Here were the Germans and a whole lot of them were these good well-intentioned people who just thought Hitler was a father figure who was going to help them and all this stuff. And because they didn't recognise the evil that was coming through him, they actually colluded with him. And he couldn't have done the incredible destruction he did without them, through their unconscious, supporting him and following him. And that's just a really, sort of very simple example of how this thing about evil, it's really important to understand it from the point of view of not just of an individual person, but it's a field phenomena.
And of course, an individual person could be so taken over - because because I talk about this in my book - that a person can be so taken over by evil that they literally become the incarnation of it or the embodiment of it. The positive aspect of that is that they are actually revealing this archetypal higher dimensional energy. They are showing what it looks like in a human being. And it's actually information. It's like a goldmine for all of us to actually understand that pathology that exists inside of all of us. There it is. Somebody's embodying it.
Joe: We have a question here from a listener called Joel. He says, "Paul touches on Wetiko having to do with addiction and unhealthy obsessions of all kinds." He says, "It would be interesting to hear more on that and especially on how it might co-opt creativity and inventiveness."
Paul: Yeah, no, that's a great question. Because the thing about Wetiko, I was saying, it's an archetypal energy, a trans-personal energy. It's greater than the human ego and yet it possesses the human ego. And another word for it, it's this daemonic energy. And that word, daemonic, is an energy that literally takes one over and then we become possessed by it.
Now etymologically, the word daemon means 'the inner voice' or 'the guiding spirit'. And it is related to the genie, as in 'I Dream of Genie' or 'genius'. It also etymologically has to do with finding your calling and hearing a voice and finding what you are here to do.
So the point being, when we connect with that daemonic energy in a conscious way, it becomes our inner voice, this guiding spirit. But if we turn away from it and don't take in what it's telling us or inviting us to do, it consolates in a negative way and becomes a demon.
Now encoded in that daemonic energy is the creative spirit. So the point being, almost like as alchemists, if we are able to access that higher dimensional archetypal daemonic trans-personal energy - whatever you call it, Wetiko or whatever - and if you able to express it creatively then you are not going to be so prone to addiction or habitual patterns or self-destructive behaviour.
But it's very much like a shaman. When a shaman gets called - and keep in mind, becoming a shaman is not something that anybody consciously would ever in their right mind would decide to do. In a way the spirits call one. And if you don't accept the calling, if you don't say, "Okay, I'm going to cooperate with this deeper process," then what happens? You get sick and you can become really crazy and you can even die. But all of a sudden, once you subscribe and say, "Okay, I'm going to cooperate with this deeper calling," then all of a sudden you find what you are here to do.
So it's a similar idea that we are all called to express our own soul and our own self in a creative way. And if we really cooperate with that and engage in that, it can heal us. It's like that apocryphal saying - 'if you don't bring what's within you' - yeah, I forget, how does it go? 'If you bring forth what's within you, what's within you will save you. But if you don't bring forth what's within you, what's within you will destroy you.' It's that same archetypal idea.
Joe: And this next question from another listener, it kinds of relates to a question I had, which was, where do you see things going if they continue on the course that they are?
The question was: "I wonder about the cycle of catastrophes." And here I think this person means cyclical kind of destruction of civilisation throughout history, "and how it relates to the human experience and the Wetiko virus. How basically humanity is perhaps bringing an unnecessary cleansing on its head to rid itself of this virus?" That's the question.
Paul: Yeah. Well, right. What's playing out in the world, it's horrifying what's happening. And I think about quantum physics. It's indeterminate. It's a realm of infinite potentiality, what's going to happen. And in the Wetiko virus, like I say, is that encoded in it; it's a superposition of states of the deepest poison and the greatest evil and toxin and all those things, and it's the greatest blessing. And it's both in potentiality, depending on are we going to recognise what it's showing us?
So my hope, and what I'm dreaming, is that more and more of us are actually beginning to wake up to the dream-like nature of reality, to that we're interconnected, interdependent, to that we are beginning to see this Wetiko virus, how it operates in our lives, in our relationships, out in the world stage, that we're beginning to actually, by seeing the dream-like nature, beginning to wake up. And beginning to realise that 'Well, we can connect with each other' and what I call 'we can conspire to co-inspire'; we can activate our collective genius in a way where we can dream ourselves awake. And that's an evolutionary impulse that we are all invited to participate in.
And that's basically what my work is about, is trying to switch people onto that. Because we are all artists, we are all creative beings. And I'm actually, as an artist, I'm creating an art happening and I'm labelling it; oh, you could call it an awakening, this global awakening, would be the name of this art happening.
And we can all participate. There's no fees or dues. Everybody gets full benefits. The point being that we can come together in a way and actually dream ourselves awake. And that's totally within the realm of possibility. And if somebody's just saying to me, "Oh, you are just a dreamer and you are not in touch with reality," I would disagree. I would say, "No, this is actually the whole point of what's playing out."
Niall: Yeah, it begs a lot of questions. It's one we've tried to answer a number of times. Namely that, with things going as they are, some people awakening from it and finding joy in it and that's good, but for the most part it makes people really despondent and afraid and in fear, at least initially.
And they come up with the question: well, what is the function of it? Or rather, they don't quite get to that, but we kind of try to point out to them that maybe there is a function, a purpose for it. Now you've got a lot of people out there who've got a hope that things will change for the better. Okay, they see the world's going bad. So what's on their mind? Revolution; 'the outer world has manifested the wrong way, I want to change that manifestation.' What do you have to say to that? It's something that we've kind of...
Paul: Yeah.
Niall: We certainly discouraged it in other people because taking to the streets, uprising, that's on their minds but...
Paul: Yeah, I have something to say about that because I talk about that it's really important to become what's called a spiritually-informed political activist.
Niall: Okay.
Paul: That is one just becomes a political activist just by itself - so many political activist, who have the best of intention, are just reacting out of their own fear or hatred or anger and unwittingly they are absolutely feeding the Wetiko virus in their reactivity in that way. But then I know a lot of spiritual people who are just of the opinion: "Oh, if I just sit in my room and meditate and do mantras and feel peace and joy then, well, the whole world will just reflect that back."
And that's true in one way and it's not true in another. And how it's not true is that we are at the point in our evolution where our inner process is manifesting as the outer world, which is to say that the way to work on our inner process is to be fully engaged in the outer world. So what I'm talking about is to cross-pollinate being a political activist and a spiritual practitioner. That's why I call it a spiritually-informed political activist. That either one by itself is incomplete.
Joe: Cool, I like that - SIPA, S-I P A.
Laura: Expand on that a little bit. I like that.
Joe: What?
Jason: Yeah, I agree. I fundamentally agree.
Laura: Yeah. So can you give us some examples of how a spiritually-informed activist...
Joe: Political activist.
Laura: Political activist would...
Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure! Right. So say, in other words, somebody of that persuasion would understand that, "Okay, I need to engage with the greater body politic but if I do it in such a way that I am reacting out of my own fear or hatred or anger or I'm like fighting evil, well, evil feeds off of that and into that." And then you are unwittingly being an agent for Wetiko.
So the idea being that you have to have the spiritual awareness, and see the deeper dream-like nature becuase any spiritual tradition is pointing at 'this is a dream'. And when you have that expanded awareness and see the dream-like nature of things, and you recognise the interdependence and the interconnection, and you tap into that, the place about your heart of compassion, and all of a sudden then you are not going to be reacting in a habitual, fear-based way, and you are not going to be fighting against the darkness, which is what the darkness depends on. You are actually seeing the deeper archetypal playing out in the world. And in a way, you can discover, "Oh yeah, there are ways I can intervene in the dream that actually help."
Because what it actually is, what we are dealing with, is a spell. What the real war is, is our unconsciousness. And as long as we are fighting with guns and tanks and bombs in the outside world, we are part of the problem. And the point is, is that how, when you wake up enough in this collective, waking dream we are having, and you see, "Oh my god, my fellow brothers and sisters we're actually entranced, thinking this is real and separate from us in a way that it is not", which is a reflection of how we are not in touch with who we are, then the way, as a spiritually-informed political activist, all of a sudden, the whole problem changes. You realise, "Wow, how can I actually be in the world which is going to help people to snap out of their entrancement and out of their being bewitched" in a certain way? Because the thing about Wetiko is it can't take away our power away from us, but it tricks us into giving it away ourselves. Okay?
So what I point out in the book is that this is the dimension where we can actually intervene in the dreaming. That's what I call it, intervening in the dreaming, where you actually can change things, where you can actually change the world. It's a very subtle thing but it's super profound. Yeah. So anyway, so that's just a little bit.
Jason: Well, there is a fundamental truth there because the way things have been set up now is it seems like the 'powers that be' are kind of trying to guilt people into fighting on their terms, try to fight with tanks and bombs and Molotov cocktails. And they seem to have a pretty good answer for that. They are ready, they want people to start to a revolution because they have the solution.
Laura: Bigger guns.
Paul: Yeah.
Jason: They've got bigger guns and they know. They want you to fight the fight on their terms.
Joe: Yep.
Jason: They are trying to control the situation, to manage it, to make sure that you think that there are only two options: 'lay down and take it' or 'pick up a gun and shoot at me'.
Paul: Right.
Jason: And they've got both those situations covered. As long as they control the argument, that they control the perception of the problem...
Joe: The debate, yeah.
Jason: ...they bait you into one, or two, or three solutions that they know they can withstand.
Joe: It's like John Lennon said: "When they get you angry or violent, then they know how to deal with you. And that's where they want you."
Jason: And Martin Luther King was really kind of big on that. That was his whole thing about non-violence, was that it's just not going to work. Even if you win, it won't work. If you win, it's actually worse, as he said, because you have to remember that if you win...
Laura: With violence.
Jason: ...you have to go back to living with these people. And you are going to have to maintain your subjugation of them because you subjugated them.
Joe: To win, yeah.
Jason: And now you are going to have to live with that. And they can't wait until they can do it to you, what you did to them. It's not solution.
Paul: Right. What you are saying is so important and right on. And I just want to point out, the one thought form I would like to interject is that what we are describing about the prevailing power structure and the 'powers that be' and all that; what's playing out in that sphere, that's a reflection of what's actually happening deep inside the collective unconscious of our species, which is to say deep inside of each one of us. And when you recognise that, that's when you begin to recognise, "Oh my god, what's playing out in the outer is symbolically reflecting back my inner situation. Wait a second, I'm looking in the mirror. This is just like a dream."
You see, that's when you begin to recognise the dream-like nature. And when I refer to the dream-like nature - if you are in a dream at night and you change your perspective, what happens? Instantaneously the dream shape-shifts to reflect back that change in viewpoint. Because what is the dream but your own mind just projected outside of yourself. So all of a sudden you begin to realise, "Oh my god, I have this incredible, intrinsic power for creating my experience."
In a sense, that's what the 'powers that be' don't want. They don't want us to tap into our infinite power of how we co-create reality moment by moment, both as individuals and particularly, how we co-create with each other. That's their worse nightmare.
Laura: Yeah.
Joe: Yeah. Paul, we have a call on the line. I'm just going to go ahead and take it here.
Paul: Sure.
Joe: Hi caller, what's your name and where are you calling from?
Shane: Hi everybody, this is Shane, calling from New York.
Joe: Hi Shane, welcome to the show! You got a question or comment for Paul?
Shane: Yeah, for Paul and the crew there. It's just a fascinating discussion. It seems there's really a lot to the concepts that Andrew Lobaczewski put out there with Political Ponerology, and how the mass of people can become infected with these pathological ideologies. And how these psychopaths really don't have much creative capacity. But with human beings themselves, we have that creative part. But when we accept their twists and turns, and just their pathology, that it kinds of acts as an infection in us and our creative ability kind of gets is what causes all the distortion that we're seeing around this and all the destruction. They're useless pretty much themselves. But when we kind of take on their thinking, that's really what propels us into this chaos.
Yeah, so I was just kind of curious if Paul was familiar with Ponerology, and just what his thoughts were on it?
Paul: Yeah, no, I'm quite familiar with that book. That's one of my favourite books. I love that book. So I think everybody should read that book. I studied that book really deeply when I wrote my book. Yeah, so I just think the Political Ponerology book is a really, really important work.
Joe: Okay. Okay, is that it Shane?
Shane: Yep, yep. Thanks.
Paul: Thank you Shane, totally.
Joe: Thanks Shane.
Shane: Bye.
Joe: I'm just going to go straight into another call here. Hi caller, what's your name and where are you calling from? Hello?
Jason: Maybe it's a listener?
Joe: No.
Joshua: Joshua from Boulder, Colorado.
Joe: Joshua.
Joshua: Yeah. Hey man, how's it going?
Joe: Hey, how are you?
Niall: Welcome!
Joshua: Hey, thanks!
Niall: Go ahead. Have you got a comment or question?
Joshua: Yeah. It sounds like Paul has done a lot of research. And I was wondering if you have ever thought about psychological implications of compassion and like the mechanics behind it? How, like having compassion for other people, how that can set your psychology up in a way that maybe Wetiko can't get a foothold? Have you thought about that?
Paul: Yeah, no. I talk about that and that's a beautiful phrase. That once you cultivate compassion - I'm a Buddhist practitioner so that's my thing - once you cultivate compassion, Wetiko can't get a foothold in your psyche. And that's a beautiful way of saying it. It's almost like when the soil is not pure, that's where the Wetiko virus can take roots and begin to flourish. You see, the thing about compassion, it's an expression. When you are in a dream - so I'll just take a step back. In Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about that awakening is the co-joining of two factors. And the two factors are emptiness and compassion.
And emptiness is the recognition that, whatever the world you are in, in your experiences, that it doesn't have an intrinsic, independent, objective existence. And a way to understand that is imagine being in a dream, in a night dream, and you recognise that you are dreaming. All of a sudden, this world that you are in, in the dream, where the moment before you thought was real, when you recognise you are dreaming you recognise, "Oh my god, it's just my own energy. It has no independent existence." That's the emptiness aspect.
But they say then that when you recognise the emptiness, the expression of that realisation is compassion. That the two always go together if it is a true awakening. So people who ask me, "Oh how can I cultivate more? I want to awaken more in the dream." Well, one of the major answers is to cultivate compassion, because that creates the soil where anything like Wetiko, it just can't take root at all.
Joshua: Right. That's kind of how I have always thought of it. So yeah, sounds like you get it. Hello? Can you hear me?
Joe: Yeah.
Joshua: Alright, cool. Hey, thanks.
Joe: Do you have another question or comment?
Joshua: No, that's it. Thanks, great show man!
Joe: Okay.
Niall: Alright. Thanks Joshua!
Paul: Awesome. Thank you, I appreciate the question Joshua. Thank you.
Joshua: Alright. Right on.
Joe: Callers or comments taken fast here. I might as well go to the next one.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Just get them out of the way. Hi caller, what's your name and where are you calling from?
Bernard: Hi, this is Bernard, calling from Los Angeles.
Joe: Hi Bernard! Welcome to the show.
Niall: Hello!
Bernard: Hey. Thanks guys. Hi there! I have a question for Paul. Regarding what you addressed before, that the Wetiko virus exists in an objective reality and not in an objective reality at the same time, or neither both of them, and the paradox. I had a question regarding what you also addressed in the book about UFO/ET phenomena.
And you write here, and I quote you, "Terence McKenna hypothesised that the ET/UFO phenomena might actually be an expression of the psychic fact that we've become so split off from our true selves that we can only begin to experience it in the projected form of an alien other. Other seeming appearances of ET/UFOs in the outer world is simply an embodied reflection of this inner psychic process, as if an archetypal process deep within the human psyche is being dreamed up into materialising itself through our universe in order to show us something about ourselves."
So my question is, I can totally see that a lot of it is our shadow projected outwards, collectively and personally, but is there also not the possibility that not everything is part of our projected shadow? And when looking deeper into the so-called ET/UFO phenomena, that there might be actually an objective reality of beings controlling and literally feeding off of us, similar like we take or use the animal or plant kingdom as resources and food? In short, again, that not everything - what's happening collectively - is particularly related to shadow projection?
Paul: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that, that's a great question. And it's not an easy answer because what I'm talking about is that - so in Buddhism, they'll talk about there's the relative level and the absolute level. And you have to honour both; they inter-penetrate.
So what I'm ultimately pointing at is who we are. So when we are not in touch with a part of ourselves, we're going to dream it up, in negative or positive form, outside in the world. And from the dimension of the relative reality, yeah, these beings, clearly they are other, they are alien, they are autonomous, they are not us. We need to relate to them in that fashion.
And what I'm talking about ultimately speaking, from the ultimate, absolute point of view, that there is no other. That it's all us. And when you see that all of a sudden, the one has a relationship to the universe, that radically changes because then all of a sudden, there is no otherness, there is no self and other. It's all just self.
So that's talking from the absolute, ultimate point of view. And from the relative point of view, there are these alien others who are autonomous and clearly, you are over there and I'm here and we're separate and other. And what I'm talking about is holding both points of view simultaneously. Because if you remember, I said the relative and the absolute inter-penetrate each other - you have to honour both.
Laura: But I think that if you try to activate the absolute point of view without the proper context, I think it may backfire.
Paul: Right. I can say Laura just read my mind.
Laura: Yeah.
Paul: You're just totally were psychic because I was just about to say I see this with a lot of really well-intentioned spiritual people. They just hear about the absolute point of view and they just assume that point of view going, "Oh, everything is one. Everything is perfect." And meanwhile, here like there is incredible evil insult and this destruction playing out in the world. And they are just, "Oh, it's all perfect! It's all one." And they are just establishing themselves in the absolute point of view but they are marginalising the relative. That's the big danger.
Jason: Right. Well, that's the danger kind of when you talk about things in this kind of very meta-way of archetypes and iconic speech, which is very true. But it's very easy for people to think that that's the only way of looking at things.
Laura: And they latch onto that.
Jason: Yeah, they latch onto that because...
Paul: Yeah, oh, completely. Yeah.
Jason: In a certain sense, it's a little bit more comforting. It's very comforting to think about 'all is one', 'we're all a part of God'.
Laura: You can even say that that's the root of disassociating from your darker self.
Jason: Right.
Laura: Because you latch onto that when it is not entirely appropriate in the context, or in the realm that we are in. Because if you step out of a ten-story window, gravity is going to act on you.
Jason: And gravity is part of you!
Laura: Yeah.
Jason: But you are still going to hit the ground.
[Laughter]
Jason: 'All is one' but, yeah, you are still going to hit the ground and pretty soon you are going to be one with the worms.
[Laughter]
Paul: Right. I just want to say to you too, you see, what you guys are pointing at, that's why like a lot of these spiritual traditions, they would have this wisdom that they would only impart to the people who have gone through initiations. Because they would understand that if they were to give these incredible teachings that 'oh, it's all a dream and we are all one' to people who didn't understand it, that they would pervert it in a way that wouldn't be helpful.
And then just one other thing too. The thing about the Wetiko virus, it can usurp any of these truths that are actually infused with this wisdom and pervert it for its own, unsavoury ends. So that's another quality that's important to understand about Wetiko.
Laura: Yeah. It's like this little story in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about the mahout and the elephants. The master was teaching his students 'we're all one, we're all one, everything is one. God is in everything, god is in everything'. Then they go out for a walk in the jungle and the mahout, the elephant handler, comes running through the forest and says, "Wild elephant! Wild elephant! Get out of the way! He's gone mad!"
So they all run away except for this one student of the master who stands there, and the elephant comes along and tramples him. And after the elephant's gone, the master comes up and says, "Why didn't you get out of the way?" And he says, "Well, master, you told me that god was in everything. And we are all one. It is all an illusion." He says, "Yeah, well, the god in the mahout told you to get out of the way."
[Laughter]
Paul: Right, totally. Yeah, yeah, now that's a great example.
Joe: Bernard, you're still there?
Bernard: Yeah.
Niall: Do you have a follow up?
Bernard: No. Yeah, that's all that I have. Thanks very much Paul. I totally agree and that was my point about these so-called higher, absolute truths, which are true obviously, and this higher level, 'everything is coming from the one, we are all one'. But a lot of people tend to use that as an excuse to deal with it on our levels, with its limitations and everything. And the danger of applying this higher truth in a very superficial, almost distorted way. It ties also into spiritual bypassing.
Paul: Yeah, totally. No, Bernard, I so appreciate your perspective really. Thank you!
Bernard: Yep, great. Thanks very much guys!
Joe: Alright Bernard. Thanks for your call.
Laura: Thanks!
Bernard: Bye.
Jason: It seems to be a lot of people who believe that stuff though, they are like kind of a dog with two bones in a certain sense because they want to use that as an excuse to not do anything. But at the same time, they want to maintain their self-hood. They want to have an existence and 'Hi, my name is John and I believe everything is one'. But they have to accept at a certain point that there is this 'relative' reality too, that there are different ways of looking at it and different types of existences.
They want to basically be a dog with two bones. They want to have the comfort of 'everything is one and all is god'. And at the same time, they still want to be themselves and they want to eat their Snickers' bar. So that's just kind of what I like to refer to as like the 'faux-mystic'. The person who just talks the talk but never recognises or walks the walk.
Paul: Right, right. And if I could just say one thing too. It's a thought that keeps on popping up so I feel like I should share it because I've seen this with a lot of really well-intentioned people involved in spiritual practice. And I think a little while ago, I just said this really quickly, but I want to go into it a little bit more, where they'll be of the opinion, "No, I don't want to at all like hear about evil or read books on evil or think about or put my attention on it because by me doing that, I'm feeding evil."
And I try to point out to them that, well, one doesn't want to become too fascinated with evil because then you actually are feeding it. But if you are just turning a blind eye, like an ostrich, and not looking at it, that's the very thing that feeds evil. But there is this other option where you actually can see it. You don't close your eyes to it. And then, being a sovereign being, we can choose where we place our attention.
So once we see how evil operates, once we see how Wetiko operates through the unconscious, we can then choose, "Oh okay, I see you. Now I want to invest my psychic energy in creating the world I want to live in." That's different. And it's unfortunate that these spiritual people that I see, by them being in avoidance, it's like they're having an avoidance of being in a relationship with a part of themselves, theyr're unwittingly feeding the very thing that they are afraid of.
Jason: There is, of course the other aspect of it is that as a person who says those kinds of things is actually a bit being facetious or not really telling the truth. Because if all is one, then so is evil. There is evil in the world. And denying it exists and trying to hide from it, is really kind of disingenuous basically when you say that kind of stuff.
Paul: Yeah.
Laura: Which brings us back...
Jason: A study of it is important.
Laura: Yeah. That brings us back to the point of appreciation for what exists and thankfulness to the fact that it does exist because it teaches us and, as Paul said earlier, when there is this great evil, that means there is a contrasting element. There is light that is causing this evil to cast such a long shadow. So it kind of goes together I think.
Jason: If you are not part of that light that is causing to be defined, that evil - the act of definition and study is actually that light projecting onto it to show it for what it is - if you are not a part of that, well, then maybe you might just be a part of it, the shadow. Maybe. I'm not saying anything for sure.
Laura: Yeah. But that comes back to what Paul is saying about people who reject the shadow in themselves and 'it's all out there'. Yeah.
Paul: Right, right, right. And whether you are talking just individually, they play that out in their own lives or with their partner, or whether we as a species are playing that out in the world, it just brings me back to the profundity of when this boundary collapses between the inner and outer and you begin to realise that's what's playing out in our psyche, deep down in the deep subconscious of each one of us, is actually getting revealed through what's playing out in the world. That it's actually like reacting back, that it's in symbolic form.
It's just like an out-picturing of what's actually happening inside of us. When you see that, you begin to realise, "Oh my god, this psyche isn't just inside of my skull, but I'm actually inside of the psyche." And that's just like a dream. Because, think about a dream. When you are in a dream, it can appear completely real and convincing and other and independent and objective.
And then for whatever reason, if you have lucidity and you realise, "Oh my god, everything that I am experiencing here, it's just my own energy. It's just a reflection of my own mind."
And it's that that I'm talking about. That when anyone of us has lucidity. You see, if I'm in a dream and if I have lucidity, that's one thing. But then if all of a sudden I meet somebody else in that dream, another dream character, an aspect of myself, and they are also waking up. And then what about if there are ten of us, or a hundred of us? Or a thousand and we get together and contemplate, "What are we realising?"
And what we are realising is that this universe we are in, we're actually dreaming it up moment by moment. It's a reflection of what I call our sacred power of dreaming. When enough of us plug in together in that way, we discover, "Oh my god, we can change the dream! That there is nothing objective, independent outside of us. It's all just our own dreaming power." And that's the evolutionary opportunity that's being offered to us. And that's the very thing that's going to save us. If we don't realise that...
Laura: Well...
Paul: Okay, go ahead.
Laura: I was going to say, we've got something like seven and a large fraction - billion people on the planet. And I would say that a vanishingly small number have this kind of awareness. And I think that the dream for those that do not choose, or cannot wake up, may not end well. I have some videos out where I talk about splitting realities. And I think that if a concentrated group of individuals can begin to see this, that they can in a sense step into another reality; kind of Wheeler's 'many-worlds' type of thing.
But then there is going to be a whole, large number of other people who will continue on the same trajectory to possible extinction because extincting large numbers of people happens apparently fairly regularly on our planet.
Paul: Right. I hear you, Laura. Yeah, there are seven billion of us. And even the Bible, I think is said something like 144000, it's a symbolic number. The way I understand that is, yeah, it's not going to be at a given point - at least at first, all seven billion. But even if there is a significant critical mass, whether you think of the hundredth monkey phenomena.
Or one beautiful image that I love is like when you have this glass of water and you take sugar crystals and you just dissolve, one by one, the grains of sugar in the water. And they just dissolve and dissolve. And then it reaches a saturation point. And you add one more grain of sugar and all of a sudden, this crystal will just spontaneously appear in the water.
That's like anyone of us having insight or the realisation of the dream-like nature or recognising who we are or seeing Wetiko, or owning our shadow, we might be that grain of sugar in the collective unconscious that precipitates a whole global awakening, because we are not separate; it's a non-local field that we all share.
Laura: Well, let's hope. We keep working, we keep working, but I have to say, quite frankly, that it looks pretty grim at the moment.
Paul: Right. But I also point out in my book - I have a section - that one of the strategies of Wetiko is to become overly pessimistic. In the same way that another strategy is to become overly optimistic and think god is going to save us. That's to totally be under the spell of Wetiko. But if we become identified with pessimism and really convinced of the truth of it, then we're actually going to invoke this reality to confirm our viewpoint. So just to be really careful about the whole thing.
Laura: Well, I don't think I'm doing that because like I said we keep working, because it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do.
Joe: Well, that touches on a point that I wanted to kind of bring up about SIPA, the spiritually-informed political activist (SIPA).
Paul: Political activist. Oh wow, I'd never even thought of it. SIPA, that's great.
Joe: So, the way you're talking about the situation in terms of 'we're dreaming this reality' and stuff, I can see how a lot of people who just took that out of context would just go with the whole New Age kind of route, which is basically: "I create my own reality. And if I don't look at anything evil, I can just create a wonderful, beautiful world. In fact I should not even look at anything bad happening in the world and ignore it all." But obviously that's not what we're not seeing.
But at the same time, you said earlier on that we should fight but against evil in this world and against this Wetiko virus type situation, but we can't allow our kind of inner darkness or our disowned parts of ourselves to fuel that fight. Because then, well, as Jason was saying earlier on, we'll basically end up engaging in the tactics of the evildoers.
So it's a very fine kind of line to walk. And it almost seems like you have to do something. You have to stand up for the true human values and the truth in this world.
Laura: Truth.
Niall: Truth.
Joe: And you have to get angry. Clearly, the stuff that's happening, the evil that people see in the world when they confront it makes them angry. But it shouldn't be an anger that is fuelled by this darkness within yourself, it should be an anger that is more maybe righteous. But at the same time, you have to hold in your mind the idea that it's almost like you can't be identified with it.
Niall: No.
Joe: You have to hold in your mind that it's almost like it is a dream and it's ultimately an illusion.
Laura: Yeah.
Joe: But you still have to pretend that it's real. Act as if it's real but understand in the background that it is an illusion. And never engage in kind of violence or anti-human actions. Is that where you are coming from, Paul?
Paul: Yeah, no, that sounds really good in the sense that - like with anger, for example. Like I've been saying, I'm a Buddhist practitioner and they will say, "Oh, if you get angry, all of your merit will get burnt up in an instant." And what they are talking about is that if you get possessed by anger, and just act it out unconsciously.
Joe: Right.
Paul: But they also have these deities, that are these wrathful deities, that are forms of enlightenment and whose essence is compassion. And they are trying to symbolically express that, yeah, it's perfectly cool to express your anger in a way with awareness where it's actually not just like you are becoming possessed by something and reacting out of fear or just reacting in general. But it's actually an expression of your enlightened compassion. That's very, very different.
Joe: Yeah.
Paul: And if I could just go back to one thing, because somebody a little while ago had asked a question, the thing about addictions and stuff like that. And I just wanted to say, you see, what I'm pointing out in the book with Wetiko, it's very related to addictions and it's also related to being in trauma. Our species is a species in trauma. We all have PTSD. And I think that's really important to understand. And the thing which is interesting about trauma is that, the first thing is that it's a sane response to an insane situation.
But what happens in trauma is that something will overwhelm your sense of self that can't be integrated in the normal way. And so what you do, the way you respond to that, is by trying to heal the very trauma that you've just suffered, you actually create the very thing that you are actually trying to heal in a feedback loop. And it's the whole compulsion to repeat the trauma. So you are recreating your trauma moment by moment. And in a sense, that's very much Wetiko. And that's very much related to like when we see ourselves acting out an addictive pattern.
But, here's the rub, that encoded in that acting out of our addiction or of our trauma, we're potentially trying to discharge something or we're potentially trying to complete an incomplete process. But if we don't have the recognition of that then we're just going to be endlessly enacting the addictive feedback loop in a way that's basically killing ourselves.
So it's that same idea that it's a superposition of states. In that acting out of our unconscious, whether it's in trauma or in addiction, it's like this incredible disease, this illness, this pathology, but encoded in it, it's like the very medium for our snapping out of the spell is the acting out of it. We have to act it out in order to unlock it. So I think that's a really good way of understanding what I'm trying to say about Wetiko. That encoded in the evil is also this potential. It's the very way that we can help ourselves to wake up.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. We have one more question that was sent in. A bit of a general question I suppose. "What does Paul think is the number one most important thing a person who's become aware of this Wetiko in themselves and others can do?"
Paul: Wow, that's a...
Joe: Is there one thing? Is there more than one thing?
Paul: Right, right. Thanks for these easy questions, right?
Joe: Yeah. [Laughter]
Paul: What came up in my mind as soon as you said that, so I'll just share that, is to express yourself creatively. Because we are all dreamers, we are all artists. And like I was saying, Wetiko is this daemonic energy and encoded in the daemon, our inner voice, our guiding spirit, is the creative spirit. And if we don't express that creativity consciously, constructively, it turns self-destructive or other-destructive.
So the point being is that if you really are seeing what I'm pointing at, then, in your own way - like I wrote a book about it. Not that you should write a book about it, you can if you want to. But in your own particular way, and we all have gifts and we all have a particular calling and a voice, and to creatively express yourself in a way that's actually going to be helpful for other people. Because what you discover is that if this is a dream and we are all characters in each others' dreams, and we're all interdependent and interconnected, if I help you, wow, I'm actually helping myself! So it's a whole new paradigm of cutting through that self and other dichotomy. And so the point being is that if we can express ourselves creatively in a way that's actually helping other people, then we are creating a win-win for everyone.
And I would say that that deepens then our lucidity and our understanding too.
Laura: I'm glad you said that because that's something that I tell people all the time because we deal with a lot - we work with the public quite a bit. We have our forum and we are constantly trying to help people to get over basically what you just said, social or societal or global PTSD. And I tell people, over and over again - they'll me or they'll tell us or they'll express on our forum stories about their past, their lives. Some of them are absolute horror stories. Some people have gone through some of the most atrocious things and have had horrible, horrible thing happen to them.
And we have an international forum. So of course we have people who were victims, like in Serbia, Kosovo and in the whole break up of the Balkan states. We have people right now, who are members of our forum, who are over there in Ukraine, in the cities where civil war is basically starting. Many things like that. And what I tell people repeatedly is if you suffer and you don't see any meaning in it, because a lot of them, they're so beaten down, they don't see any meaning in anything.
And I tell them, why don't you write a blog? Create a blog. Write your life story. It doesn't have to be with your name on it, it can be anonymous. You can write your life story. And you can share what has happened to you. And if writing isn't your thing, paint pictures about it or draw pictures about it. Make music about it. Do something about it, share it. Because there is a group of somebodies out there who are going to be right on your wavelength. They're going to be tuned into what you have to say. What you've experienced, they've experienced it too. And they are going to get something, they are going to learn something. It's going to be healing for them because if you can write about it, then they can write about it too.
And if everybody starts doing some of these writing exercises and talking about the things that have been happening to them, then what happens is, is the light gets shone on the virus. Because they are exposing it. And if everybody would start in their own individual way creatively exposing what has happened to them or exposing what's going on in the world, wherever they are, then everybody would know what's going on. And it's just some of them are so beaten down. It's just really sad.
Paul: Yeah, no, I appreciate that Laura. Like what you're saying, I just want to bring my own self in. So I don't have any family. My father was like a genuine psychopath. I was in the role of pointing it out and I got marginalised and demonised and became the identified patient. Then my mother died thinking I was mentally ill and all the other relatives have ex-communicated me. So it's been really painful for me.
Laura: Yeah.
Paul: People who haven't been through that can't even imagine. In indigenous cultures, it's the worse form of punishment to be banished or ostracised or ex-communicated by your tribe and that's what's happened to me. And I'm not going to go into the story. But what the point is, is that, what you were saying is that, more and more I have been thinking about, "Wow, I need to write something about what's played out for me."
Not in an indulgent way or not even so much the personal stuff. But just because I know, I intuitively know, that there is like an underlying pattern that played out in my process with my family that could really be helpful for other people to hear because, I bet so many other people, a similar thing has played out in their own way. And to have somebody express like the deeper archetypal like process of it could be really, really helpful for them to then get in touch with their voice.
Niall: Sure.
Laura: Yeah. And that's why I'm saying that I wholeheartedly agree with creativity being the whole solution to this, one way or another. And if the only thing you can do is - and sometimes this is true. We have our news website. And sometimes people are so wounded, they can't get to the point where they can write about anything. But it makes them feel better to be able to find, and collect and post and comment on articles on our website because they feel like they are doing something.
They are collecting information. They are exposing the lies for what they are. And we try to find different ways that people can help if they don't have specific artistic abilities. But ultimately, I want to see everybody begin to express their artistic talents, their creativity.
Paul: Yeah. Well, the thing, what you are saying. it's so important, Laura. Because in the book I even talk about, the artist is going to be the figure that heals the world. And it totally has to do with what we are talking about.
And you are also pointing out the profound importance of being in community. Because part of being in the collective psychosis like we are in, with the Wetiko virus being pervading the world like it is, is that so many people feel isolated, and fragmented and just not connected with other people.
And that itself is an outside reflection of what's happened in their mind, of their own inner fragmentation. Even in Buddhism, they'll about one of the main supports of enlightenment is the Sangha, is the community of other awakening beings.
Laura: Exactly.
Paul: And so it's profoundly important to connect with other beings who speak the language. And we can all, in a sense, hold up a mirror for each other to reflect back our Buddha nature or who we really are. Instead of projecting the shadow, we can dream each other up in a high way, in a good, in a true way. Because there is an energetic something that happens when we hang out with each other that can either be, we can project the shadow and keep each other down and just enact our abuse and play out our unconscious in a way that's not helpful. Or we can actually hold each other in really high regard. And connect with each and create a container between us in a way we can all help each other to deepen our lucidity and to even deepen our awakening.
Laura: And that's what we've been really kind of pushing for in the last couple of years, is people forming soul communities. What you've just talked about, awakening people because, as you just said, you've lost your birth community, so to say.
Paul: Yeah, totally.
Laura: Your birth family, your tribe. And so many other people have too. Because, by the rules of genetic recombination, we get born into families. Sometimes we take the genetics that we can get in order to come in and do our job. And we may find ourselves completely lost with our birth family. But then we find fellow awakening beings and we can form families with them. We can form communities with them. We can form tribes with them. People need their tribes.
Paul: Right, totally.
Laura: They need to get back to this. And they need to interact with each other constantly on a daily level. And it's just, I see that as kind of the path to the future.
Jason: And if you think about that though, you know that society and culture, Western culture, has for a very long time been suspiciously working against the idea of community and family. Everything is about moving out on your own, everybody lives separately and you've got your whole little island thing going on, which is sort of really droned in from every angle.
Niall: Yeah. The Wetiko virus encourages it.
Laura: Yeah, because...
Paul: Yeah, totally.
Jason: So the Wetiko virus wants us to be alone, divide and conquer. And the Western civilisation, for sure, not knowing much about many other civilisations, I can't really comment there - but has definitely been divided and conquered, in a certain sense.
Laura: Yeah. Tribal societies where tribes or communities, were very close, where they help each other, where children are raised together, where everybody knows each other. And extended families. I have this big, extended family. And we all live together. We may not all be genetically related but we're related by soul.
Paul: Right, totally. Yeah, yeah, that idea, that there is a soul family, the way I understand that is that, because people who talk about that, they will say that the underlying sort of theme of that is to help each other to wake up. In a way reciprocal individuation, that they have a contract with each other over these lifetimes to connect so that they can help each other to remember. And that's really interesting to me, the fact that we sort of atemporally, as individuals, have this contract with other people, parts of ourselves, to connect when the time is right. And to help each other to remember to remember. That's really interesting.
You see, because I'm just interested in the: 'if this is a dream, how can we intervene in the dream?' How can we go about this dream in a way that can help ourselves to wake up?' And we can connect with each other in a way where we can deepen our lucidity.
And that's one of the things that I do. I have all of these circles out here, where I am, of people who are awakening to the dream-like nature. Every week we meet. There's three or four of them a week. And we don't have any agenda except just to be in the moment and to connect with each other, but with the awareness that we're having a mass shared dream. And when you just follow that, you discover creative ways of, "Oh, we can deepen our lucidity by just following whatever is unfolding with awareness."
Laura: Well, that comes back to the creativity thing because if you are putting your story out there, if you're getting engaged in some kind of a community activity, to help other people wake up, you're going to find your soul family. Because you are going to be sending out a signal.
If you are not doing anything, you are not sending out a signal. If you are not writing, or painting or interacting in some way. And with all of the bad things about it, the internet still is a glorious opportunity for people across the planet, who might otherwise never have been able to connect with one another, to connect. Look at my husband. If there had not been the internet, I would not have met my husband.
Joe: But you didn't find him on one of those websites though?
Jason: No.
Laura: Well, no. I was doing my work. I was publishing my material. He read my material, he was interested, he contacted me. That's how it should happen. You should be doing your mission. You should be doing what you love. You should be being creative. And then somebody else who is also at the same level or somebody who is interested in the same things will respond, reciprocate. You'll connect!
Jason: Well, I do have one thing to say. Something that I find is that a lot of people, they kind of allow an exterior definition of creativity. If they can't paint and they can't write or they can't compose music, all of a sudden they think, "Well, I can't do anything creative."
And I think that people should do whatever it is that they feel is creative. Anything that you do can be creative. You can build stuff, you can be a cook, you can do all of these other things. There are a myriad of manifestations of creativity that a person can go to. So if a person doesn't feel that they can write, compose music or paint, it doesn't mean that there isn't something else they can do creatively. Pottery, anything!
Paul: Yeah, I think that that's a really important point. Yeah, or even so much just like cleaning the house or washing the dishes can be done creatively. Anything can be a creative act. That's the point.
Jason: Exactly.
Laura: Absolutely! Well, we're getting close to the end here.
Joe: Yeah. Well, I don't want to keep Paul too long.
Niall: Paul has to go.
Joe: Because I know he's got an appointment.
Niall: He has to meet some members of his tribe.
Joe: Yes, exactly.
Paul: Yeah, totally.
Joe: But it's been great, Paul. It's been an excellent discussion. And I think we really got to the heart of different matters.
Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I just really appreciate it. And just know too, because when you had announced before my site, it was the wrong website that you said.
Joe: Uh-oh!
Paul: Oh, that's okay. So it's: Awakeninthedream.com. And you'll see my book, but also there is a ton of articles on the site. And they are all for free. Because this information, I just want to get it out. Yeah, and I just really appreciate this. As we were talking, I was realising, wow, this is the type of discussion I just love! So I really want to thank you guys.
Niall: Yeah, us too!
Jason: Yeah.
Joe: We're going to get it up on various different websites and stuff. It'll be on Blog Talk Radio and we'll put it on Youtube and we'll put it on our own site, Sott.net. And I'll send you some links so that you can share them around if you want.
Paul: Oh, that's beautiful! Really, really appreciate that.
Laura: Yeah. We're going to get it up there. And we're going to keep on trucking, no matter what!
Joe: And you too.
Paul: Yeah, I just wanted to say before, Laura, I'm a big fan of you. I studied, when I wrote my book, I read the whole Secret History of the World and then the -
Joe: And The Wave series?
Paul: And The Wave series. Particularly what I really appreciated - that you're one of the few people who writes about evil in a way that's really, really intelligent. And so I've just been a fan of yours. When I realised it was you on this show here, I was like, "Oh my god, I feel really honoured!" So just wanted you to know that.
Laura: Oh, thank you. That's - don't be silly now!
[Laughter]
We're just happy to have you on. And if you haven't read my new book, Comets and the Horns of Moses, it's kind of like volume two of Secret History of the World. I think you'll like it.
Paul: Oh my god!
Laura: And I think it's a lot more entertaining.
Paul: I would love to see it.
Laura: Yeah, so -
Joe: We'll send you a copy.
Laura: We'll get you a copy.
Paul: Okay, great. That would be great. I'll send you like my honour and email my address or something.
Joe: Okay.
Paul: But yeah, I just really admire your work. It's been helpful for me.
Joe: Thanks.
Laura: Thank you so much and I admire yours.
Jason: We admire your book actually.
Joe: Yeah, you've done a great work yourself.
Paul: Yeah, I wanted to say - if you guys don't have a book, I'm happy to send you a book. We'll talk afterwards, whatever.
Jason: I think we have several copies.
Niall: Yeah, I think we have a copy. But listeners, the book is called Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Fantastic book!
Laura: And I highly recommended!
Joe: And yeah.
Laura: Paul sent me a copy out when the first incarnation was done. And I really, really liked it! And I wrote him a letter and I said that I really, really like it!
[Laughter]
Joe: Okay.
Paul: Well, thank you. That's beautiful.
Joe: Alright, Paul.
Laura: Thank you. Goodnight!
Jason: Goodnight.
Paul: Okay guys! So hey, thank you so much!
Joe: Okay.
Paul: Okay, take care.
Niall: Bye-bye!
Paul: Okay.
Joe: Take it easy. Alright folks, I think that's it for this week. We hope you enjoyed the show. Do we have any special announcements?
Laura: No?
Joe: Nobody's got any special announcements.
Jason: Oh yeah.
Joe: Jason has a special announcement.
Jason: I have a special announcement.
Joe: Special announcement.
Jason: Go to Amazon.com and get Secret History and the Horns of Moses.
Joe: Comets and the Horns of Moses.
Laura: Comets and the Horns of Moses.
Joe: And Political Ponerology, and all of our other books!
Jason: I just wish the title would like three or four words. [Laughter]
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: I have a question.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: Is next week's show confirmed?
Joe: Not yet, but it will be soon. So yeah, until then, thanks to our callers and thanks to our listeners and our chatters. And to everybody here.
Jason: Bye-bye.
Niall: See you next week! Bye!
Laura: Bye!
Joe: Bye-bye.
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