Paul Levy, author of several books on wetiko, the mind-virus named by indigenous peoples, discusses the biography behind that work with Pinchbeck. Levy, based in Portland, declines the label of therapist even though many of his clients are analysts and psychiatrists. He describes a father he characterizes as a psychopath, years of intensive meditation and psychedelic practice after moving to the Bay Area, and a 1981 awakening in meditation in which he perceived reality as a collective dream, which led to repeated psychiatric hospitalization and a bipolar diagnosis he refused. He credits Tibetan Buddhist teachers, dreamwork, shamanism, alchemy and Jung with his recovery. His first book, on George W. Bush, already contained the wetiko idea. The conversation ends on quantum physics.
Guest: Paul Levy
In brief
- Levy says his 1981 kundalini awakening was misread as mental illness, and that being hospitalized, medicated and told he would carry the diagnosis for life was itself traumatic.
- Levy notes that authors of the DSM-III have since conceded the chemical-imbalance model was invented, and says he knew at the time the diagnosis was wrong.
- Levy describes being the recipient of his father's unconscious, repressed material, an experience he treats as the personal ground of his later account of wetiko.
- Levy says his first book presented George W. Bush as a dream character the collective dreamed up to embody its own insanity, encoding the wetiko idea before he had a name for it.
- Levy argues that quantum physics went looking for the physical building blocks of reality and found consciousness to be more fundamental than anything physical.
- Levy holds that both outcomes, self-destruction and collective awakening, are really available, and asks what people are doing if they are not envisioning the second.
Full text
everybody uh today I'm super excited to be here with uh Paul Levy whose work I've been tracking for uh for many years and um yeah he's had some wonderful contributions to the the collective discourse um Paul where where do we find you today well where we well I'm in Portland Oregon right now yeah and I just got back after traveling for the last couple months yeah where'd you go well I basically went to Eastern Oregon um for a while and then I was I flew down to Austin um for an interview and just got back within the week you didn't go out there for the eclipse uh stuff no I I wish I had um when they when we made the arrangements for the interviews before the eclipse came on my map so I was a week early um okay so let's see um let's go back over your your writing history a little bit you also work as a therapist I understand kind of like young therapist yeah not a th no I'm not a therapist I I don't ever call myself a therapist you know other people they refer to me as a therapist but I'm I'm just um you know I've whatever um created a body of work that's really helping people and so people they read my work and they want to talk with me they want to work with me and I'm happy to do that so it's kind of like a therapist but I never ever call myself that you know and interesting thing so many of my clients are a therapist or psychiatrist or or youngian analysts and here I just I'm not I'm not certified in that way yeah um I guess you're you're helping you're like the wio doctor you're helping diagnose their their wio right right I'm the wio doctor yeah no that's in a way that's true people who they read my work and some people just don't get it it goes over their head but other people who've been through it they recognize that I'm pointing at something that e that every one of us has to navigate and then they you know hopefully get benefit by hanging out and talking with me about it you know about their process let's just go back a bit through your like sort of you know intellectual trajectory like kind of where um where did you begin where what are some of the the stops along the way you know yeah yeah no I have my background is unique in that I was you know just basically a normal happy healthy kid um you know was on a mainstream path and then um you know I don't to go into the story but my father wound up being taken over by something and he W wound up that he was you know and I'm not exaggerating when I say he was a criminal he was a bad guy he was really sort of like a psychopath in a real way and I was the recipient of him acting out his unconscious repressed stuff and particularly when I was in college when I was individuating and realizing I'm a creative person and um so he tried to obliterate that creative impulse in me and it just created enormous suffering for me to the point where I went from being a happy healthy kid to not being able to live my life the suffering was so overwhelming and I just went inwards you know doing psychedelics where did you grow up I grew up right outside Manhattan right outside New York City right North in Westchester County and um you know but I'm I'm I'm a New Yorker but I haven't lived in New York since 1990 but what happened was um The Suffering was so intense and we're talking about in the 80s I had moved from New York to the Bay Area that the only thing that I could figure out that would help were um you know was going inwards was doing meditation and assuming the position of the witness combined with you know exploring psychedelics and plant medicine and all that and I did that so intensely for a couple of years probably about average 4 hours a day of meditating um and it you know I just got very one-pointed and then I had an Awakening one day in meditation I got hit by a bolt of lightning you know in my brain it just ignited and I I knew nothing about Kundalini or anything like that and um I went into such an extreme state within hours and one way of describing it I was recognizing oh this is a collective dream we're all dreaming up into manifestation Moment by moment this very world and I was so ecstatic and enthusiastic that it freaked people out from their point of view it was it was like I had a radical personality change and within 24 hours I got thrown in my first mental hospital and told oh you're mentally ill you're bipolar you're going to have this illness the rest of your life and it was so obvious to me that I wasn't that and they didn't know what they were talking about and that's what saved me and so that's the start you know and I can go on and on there's all these was that curiosity that was in um the spring of of 1981 yeah yeah I mean um that's great that you had I mean that that sounds like a classic I see you have a Tibetan Buddhist Shrine behind youbing seems to be exactly what like lcha talks about and the Zen tradition or basically what right totally oh absolutely but I was 24 year old kid there was no way I was able to integrate it just that moment it was so overwhelming and um yeah and then about three or four other times and then in next a little bit over a year because I was a free agent I was hospitalized and always diagnosed so you have this newly discovered chemical imbalance you know and that's come out now the same authors of the dsm3 have have over the last number of years come out and said oh we made that up there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance the pharmaceutical companies you know they it was their idea to sell more drugs and make more money and I knew I didn't have any chemical imbalance it couldn't have been more clear to me that I was having an Awakening and um but it it was unbelievably traumatic the abuse of just being thrown into these psychiatric hospitals and misdiagnosed and medicated and projected upon I mean it was that on top of what played out with my father just created this enormous suffering for me and it took me over a 10 years of going to therapy and just doing my own inner work connecting with my dreams connecting with my teachers you know these great Tibetan llamas you know Shamanism Alchemy just the work of young and over the course of years I began to synthesize all of these traditions in my own mind in a way that has help to heal me so you know amazing um yeah and um what was your first book was it the Awakening in the dream book or was it the uh was it no the first book was the one in the early 2000s when when George W Bush was president and I was so freaked out by him that I wrote a book um The Madness of George W bush reflection of collective psychosis and I was pointing out that he was a dream character that we dreamed him up to embody our own Insanity that was the point of the book and in coded in that book was my work on wtio I didn't have the name for it then you know but I was pointing at exactly what you know I've since written three books on this mind virus that the indigenous people call wtio yeah which which indigenous remind me again which indigenous culture is that is is that well it's really you know um the alonquin the cre Indians the oju they all have slightly different names for it windigo watio and but it's all throughout the Native American tradition they're pointing at this cannibalistic spirit that you know is the root of evil that can take over a person such that they become possessed and acted out um so yeah I think I think we published some of that book I I read I was editing that reality sandwich that web magazine right I I think we published some some of your early work yeah yeah I remember was getting traction like people were super excited by you know what you were saying and so on yeah yeah yeah um so um okay so so you wrote the book about the madness but so so you already a lot of your ideas kind of formulated around kind of like the sort of um in a way trying to like get this yian sort of Tibetan Buddhist kind of construct I guess kind of across to people in a way yeah well and it was also very much influenced by you know the nuc uh quantum physics you could say the new discoveries in physics and this being a dream which is very much in line with with Tibetan Buddhism and um and the fact you know like the idea of a mind virus all it's really pointing out we're pointing at is that the origin and the solution of our Collective you know psychosis is to be found within the psyche and that just was really obvious to me not only you know out there with my father with the family which protected him with the mental health system but I was realizing all of those were iterations of a deeper fractal that was informing the body politic of our world and and it interfaced with each of our minds it's not something out there but it's not separate from our our own minds and that became really interesting to me because I saw how I was affected and impacted by the madness that was playing out in my family and in the world yeah and and um and I'm sure you discussed this in the book but it's been a while since I checked out the wio books how how did what you know is it the Western Anglo European culture in particular that somehow carried this virus to its ex yeah well on the one hand it's such an idealized verse to think it's just the west and it is I think more predominant in the west because the West is under the spell of the the materialist scientific materialist Paradigm but it's also in indigenous cultures too you know it's this uh it's not just monopolized by the West just I think part of being like this human being is that we have this darker part that if we don't shed light on it and and get into like some sort of conscious sort of relationship with it it it possesses us such that we compulsively can't help but to act it out but I think it it's a helpful idea to see it more as it's played out in the west as westerners because it's particularly kind of come out of the point of view of the materialist scientific materialist point of view that thinks the world is objective and thinks of us as a separate subject that's not you know that's separate from the the world you know I guess I you know for a long time I was always trying to figure out what the origin of of the error was you know like um I mean you know um David Abram's book The spell of the sensuous yeah it's a beautiful book maybe we went off track when we developed an alphabet that that you know that sort of abstracted our senses from the physical world or um right you know I guess Renee Eiser Ryan eer the chalice and the blade that actually have to do with the loss of the great mother archetype and sort of the masculine over or um obvious Ian mcgilchrist is now you know very popular his thing is that we have a I guess the D the domination of the left hemisphere of the brain right um what what do you see I mean how how did we arrive at this particular um situation like what what was what was about a certain culture that allowed it to um take off well I would I would basically you know I think a helpful way to think about answering that question is to think about that by our nature we have this creative power to create our experience right to create our experience of the world and of ourselves and like you know one very easy example I think that can help to explain what I'm pointing at is that if you're in a dream in a night dream right so to invoke the imagination and if you're holding a perspective right whatever perspective you're holding then their Night Dream which is nothing other than a reflection of your mind will just instantaneously you know both in in that exact moment and over time will give you all the evidence confirming the objective truth of your Viewpoint and and you know all of a sudden you have confirmation you have evidence oh the way I'm seeing is correct so say if you're seeing that the dream you're in is objective is separate and you know and it's solid and it's other than yourself and you're holding that Viewpoint then the the dream which is nothing other than your own mind mind gives you all the evidence confirming your Viewpoint you become even more entrenched in that Viewpoint and then you even see it even more that way as being objective add infinitum it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which what I'm describing is the person has entranced themselves they've hypnotized themselves and the origin of that process is within our own mind so what I'm saying is that we all have this incredible creative agency and power but to the extent that we're unconscious of it it gets turned against us in a way that creates a cocoon around us and suffocates ourselves and in a way that's a description of wo what I just described and that's something that's happening each and every moment and I I wanted to say that's only one half of it because when in that dream if you think that the world exists objectively well then the other half of that is that you're then Conjuring yourself up as being a subject it's being an ego the subject in relation to the object to the objective world so the the more you entrance Yourself by seeing the world is other than yourself and you don't recognize that you're part of the world that you're interdependent and interconnected with the with the whole universe to the extent you see the world as objective your dreaming yourself up is being subjective and those two experiences the experience of thinking there's an objective World which is just an idea there's no carlet in reality and your subjective experience of experiencing yourself as and the ego is the subject they reciprocally coise and reinforce each other that's the main illusion upon which all the other Illusions are generated out of that's what my work is trying to set light on is to see through that and then the energy that was invested in creating that illusion upon illusion becomes available for creativity and for compassion and for love um yeah that that makes sense to me I mean I guess um you know I'm I'm you know I've written about and been curious about kind of um you know we seem to have created this you know geopolitical people call the poly crisis or the metac crisis it's kind of ecological and geopolitical um you know disaster you know which could even end to like human society splintering or or drive us to Extinction right you know so I guess I guess that there's some there's some collective and individual uh unconscious strive to you know dream that into our reality um in some sense yeah well what I would point out say if somebody came into my office today and they had this dream right and the dream was exactly what's happening in the world you know how our freedoms are being taken away totalitarianism is creeping all over the planet you etc etc and they would ask wow I had this dream like how do I interpret it what is the meaning and you know just to get right to the point I would point out well clearly you're not in touch with your intrinsic creative power you've outsourced it so that the powers that be are are incredibly happy to to use your own creative power against you and so what I would say the message of the dream is is for the dreamer to really connect with their intrinsic creative power and that's why in all of my work around the Mind virus I'm pointing out that the antidote and the medicine for the Mind virus and it's actually hidden encoded within the Mind virus it's actually showing us that the solution to our world crises all the multiple crises that are converging is for each one of us to the extent we're able to connect with our creative Spirit um and you think of enough people connected to their creative spirit will somehow dissolve the negative projection well all that I'm saying you see that it's a it's a really interesting idea because and keep in mind it's not just my idea I mean the more I I've been studying Young's work for 40 plus years and more and more and more I I really get this is the main thing he was pointing at he goes if we want to change the world it starts with the individual and even one person actually Awakening to their nature could be the very and he has all these different phrases of um you know could be the very thing that creates a change in the collective unconscious of our species and and I feel that that's true at least hypothetically I mean it's a very you know it's an overwhelming kind of situation that we're in because part of the spell is that oh I'm only like one person and I feel helpless and hopeless but and then I bring in quantum physics quantum physics you know which is offering us the medicine for the Mind virus it's saying no even like one person any one of us has unimaginably vast creative power and so what quantum physics saying combined with young and I'm just translating is that yeah it's it's an idea that is is very possible it's it's within the realm of the possible and that's what quantum physics is pointing at is that if something even though it's highly unlikely it could still actually it could Manifest this very next month so the point that any one of us particularly when we connect with other people who are also having Lucidity to the dreamlike nature and Awakening to the dream like nature when people like that connect that can have like a realtime effect in the present moment on the collective unconscious of our species definitely yeah I I guess um Ian I love the idea but I also feel that like you know there have been a lot of um communities exploring this and you Tibetan llamas even today who are you know quite realized and so on right you know and yet um I mean I I guess I'm I'm a little bit of a lefty activist still where I also feel it you know on the one hand it's it's the mind and its constructs I agree with that but the other hand it's also like you know Legacy systems and structures like the inertia right put into into motion or we didn't even you know they were put into motion you know like before we were even born right no and I'm not I'm not you know saying no that's that's not real no those Legacy systems the underlying structure that emerged out of our unconsciousness out of wo that's a thing we have to deal with you know but if we deal with it from a place in ourselves that's asleep well that's just going to create more Darkness you know right but I guess it's hard to know when you're truly woken up right because there's always layers of the Shadow oh yeah oh absolutely I mean in no way am I I mean people who know me would laugh I mean I openly share my wounds and strugg Les and you know so no I'm just somebody who plugged in to whatever degree I am and it's continually you know just just evolving and expanding but I think the key thing is is to not fall into despair to not fall into pessimism or helplessness because by doing that and we have all the evidence we need to you know to point us into oh things are but like if we fall into that point of view then we're part of the problem yeah um but don't you think also there's a little bit of a tendency you know I've been part of like the birding man culture for many years I kind of had to pull back finally for various reasons but that that sometimes this focus on the self and this idea that the individual you know has to go through this long realization process um becomes sort of an opportunity for people to maybe not you know focus on the systems and structures you know yeah yeah yeah I see that a lot a lot of spiritual people I know Burning Man people psychedelic Iz people they'll become self-absorbed they'll become like oh no I need to like you know really you know because the thing about this mind virus the watio Mind virus it can exploit even the most positive impulse to serve its Sinister ends but you know the the whole point is when you connect with your nature sufficiently there's a couple things on the one hand you have the recognition oh I don't exist in the way I've been imagining that I do as a separate entity that I'm actually interconnected and interdependent and out of the out of that Springs compassion and compassion is the dissolver of the Mind virus but then also connecting with our self that's such a cliche people are like oh just remember who you are connect with your true self what the hell does that mean and I point out well what is the true self by its nature it's creative and so when we connect with our true self then we embody and express ourselves Crea and the more we do that the more we deepen the realization of our nature in a positive feedback loop okay yeah although I mean just Devil's Advocate again it's just my nature I there's lot who get to a certain point and uh you know they you know they may be incredibly expressive creatively you know but and even understand something about realization yet um they still hit their limits right like they don't um yeah and it's okay to hit your limits cuz that's the next step in your evolution is to somehow shed light to that but I think what you're pointing at is that people hit their limits and they then don't go any further and they stay stuck at that limit and and that's tragic um yeah we were talking about the um witho and how the indigenous people uh responded to the book and and what kind of feedback you got from them right right and and personally I've gotten just just 100% of this positive feedback but I'm I'm well aware of you know issue of oh am I appropriating indigenous wisdom and and I try to make clear in my work that no I'm not appropriating it I'm I'm just kind of trying to honor it and translating the wisdom of the indigenous culture into a modern psychological idiom and there was one um indigenous Elder he's a medicine man who he had read my work on wio and was so impacted he wanted to meet me so he he drove all the way from the east coast to my house in in Oregon in Portland and you know I had him over for tea and um and then he was kind enough to to write this beautiful endorsement of my work and so yeah it hasn't been problematic at all you know really um yeah so let's um I was kind of curious actually have you gotten um interested in like uh analytic or ministic idealism it's a it's a very similar kind of philosophy like we castrop have you looked at him at all yeah no I know I know Bernard I love his work and I think we're we're pointing at at least from my point of view and we're like tapped into something very very similar so I think my answer is yeah I I'm I appreciate that point of view very much yeah because he also it's very similar to the Tibetan Buddhist idea that underlying everything is consciousness is like the ontological Primitive and world just kind of dream dreams that Consciousness is is having yeah exactly yeah yeah another um um book he wrote was sort of arguing I mean he's also obviously very inspired by Young right if we if we accept this idea that um we're all kind of dreams and this kind of fields of Consciousness um then we have kind of the it makes sense to look at everything allegorically that everything as in a dream the symbols and stories have this kind of ulterior meaning or motive um in the real world what's that yeah that's exactly right I you know I'm continually bringing that's that's in his whole work young kept on trying to bring forth what he called cultivating this symbolic awareness because what is the language of dreams but symbols and the ideas to interpret our life as a dream and to to recognize it's an oracle that speaking symbolically it's that same idea yeah um yeah I mean that also I find that very interesting when we think about you know kind of this sort of you know ecological and geopolitical crisis so that's somehow part of the story that you know is is being woven through us you know in a way um how do you how do you feel about Free Will I mean do you think that humans have um free will or is it more of a paradox yeah and and I'm aware that that's um a really sort of Hot Topic when I'll put it that way in the sense that okay my take on it is that what a lot of people call Free Will isn't free will you know in that you know maybe something in their unconscious is taking them over they're they become an instrument to act something out and they could be having the subc of experience oh no this is my free will when it's actually the opposite but then I think of one one of my teachers this great Tibetan llama who is you know the head of one of the lineages of the four lineages and he talks about when you really awaken to the dreamlike nature it's like you have your hand in the sky and you can wave it any direction you want and you have total freedom of Will and that's free will but I feel that that's not like you know so many people when they talk about free will they're not talking out of that level of realization okay so to have free will we have to get fully realized is basically the or I don't know fully realized but to a large degree but I've just been so triggered by people who are asleep at at least from my point of view in a certain way and are like putting out that no they're acting out of their own free will and from my perspective it's anything but uh and I want to talk a little bit I really enjoyed your book and I wrote about it a little bit the quantum Revelation book uh do you want to like you know give a sort of summary of that or kind of like what yeah yeah yeah I can give a real summary and and there's a newer addition of that coming out in the fall because I've had further downloads and in essence you know I'm no I'm no physicist so I don't I you know I want to make that clear but for like 40 years I've been having these totally out of the ordinary experiences and then when I found quantum physics I understood oh these guys and you know are articulating um the very universe that I had fallen into and so just very simply in essence before quantum physics came onto the scene and into the world and into our minds the physicist thought they were exploring this objective world that they were just passively trying to understand then quantum physics um you know it it came into the world 100 years ago or you know something like that and it proved empirically proved again and again without a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as an objective world that that's only an idea in our head it is no caret to reality the point is the act of observation actually influences the universe that we're observing okay now what that that's the rabbit hole that I go down because that's a description of a dream if you're in a dream if you change the way you're perceiving the way the dream manifest changes because it's nothing other than your own mind okay and so going down that rabbit hole it it's pointing out that our observation our perception is creative that we're not just passive observers that in the act of perceiving we're actually creating the universe that we're perceiving but it's happening outside of time it's happening both over time and in zero time in in the present moment continually each and every moment and when you really take in what does that mean that our Act of perception is creative it means it's pointing out it's an expression of that we're having a dream that's a complete precise description of a dream so in essence quantum physics has empirically proven that we're having a collectively shared dream and of course the normal academic corporatized scientist isn't trained to really understand this or to recognize this I'm not a physicist I'm not a scientist and my whole book is basically pointing out quantum physics is showing us that we're having a collective dream that we have this unimaginably vast creative agency and power at each and every moment to create our experience there's no one else doing that to us we are the ones who are interpreting the waking inplant placing this meaning on on it and thereby creating our experience and um so that's just a small little bit of like that's like a thumbnail sketch of of what quantum physics is offering us and that's the medicine for wao because wao one way of describing whato is that it it operates through our blind spots through the unconscious in such a way that we entrance ourselves via our own projections onto the waking ink plot and we we entrance ourselves by then thinking that this universe objectively exists and then we react to it we become conditioned in an infinitely self-reinforcing feedback loop that's whato that that's samsara in Buddhism and quantum physics is saying hey look there is nothing out there that's separate from your own mind just like a dream and when you recognize that it unlocks the most unimaginably vast creative power that's our nature yeah I guess the 20 2022 Nobel Prize in physics went to experiments demonstrating that the universe is not locally real over and over again right right exactly I mean uh you know what to what extent do you think most of the world's uh contemporary world is still stuck in a sort of materialist reductive materialist or physical physicalist worldview yeah yeah yeah and I don't know how to answer that with numbers but I call it um sort of like a hangover an objective reality hangover that it's been so many you know years of our species just you know like entranced by our own mind thinking that the world objectively exist that here's quantum physics that's proven that that that that's nonsense and yet it's so deeply entrenched in our unconscious and and plus the the quantum physics what it's discovered and its offering its insights is so like off the radar it's like this radical point of view that's different from our you know materialistic the scientific materialistic point of view that it typically takes years and years and years for that to be taken online by the common person and what do you think what do you think Could Happen let's say let's say you know this is something I think I sent you this paper I sent it to I'm working this Think Tank and we we just did a Pap called the idealism option and so we're and this sort of goes along with this conference we want to do like um you know since now it feels very you know kind of grounded that physicalism or reductive materialism is a bit obsolete right then you're left with either pan psychism or manistic idealism uh and pan psychism is interesting but just doesn't seem as coherent or satisfying as idealism it sort of still has you know psychism it's like everything has like a mind-like attribute but there's still sort of a dualism between like mind and matter on some level right butm seems very coherent that's what ber castr is arguing that's what TR Buddism is arguing that's what quantum physics seems to reveal what do you think would happen to our civilization or what will happen if this uh idealist Consciousness first uh worldview uh starts to permeate or starts to replace Cur worldview yeah yeah yeah and I guess one answer to that is I and the two of us can only imagine what would happen you know because it really is it's tapping into to the potency of the imagination but what what I find myself in my imagination what I'm what I'm thinking is that say if the two of us you know really in this moment we really awaken sufficiently and not that we aren't maybe we already are um you know and we we really awaken to the dreamlike nature and then we connect with whether it's or other people other friends of ours and we're all hanging out with the realization oh my God this waking dream is manifesting the way it is with all its problems because we've been conditioned to dream it that way what do we what do we imagine then um how would that how would that unfold and what I easily imagine is that as a sufficient number of us more and more people get in Phase with each other get in sync with each other via that lucid realization we discover that we can actually change the dream we're having and that that's what this is all about from my point of view one other way of saying that is that we discover that we can consciously participate in our own Evolution and um and that in a way that's what this is all about have you seen you know movements that have tried to do that like I think of for instance like Osho that's what ocean was all about he was trying to like convey that it was all a dream that the rolls-royces were a dream that sex was was a dream or whatever but somehow it it went toxic it went it went wrong so I mean how right you know it seems like these kind of efforts sort of try to happen but then we're not ready for them or they end up you know causing a whole new set of difficulties or something right right and then you know and I'm glad you brought up the oso thing you know being out an Oregon because you know I mean that's this is where it happened happened and to me it's an example of when you have the intention to like bring in light you're going to guaranteed invoke a guest and the guest is the unconscious is the Shadow and that's going to play itself out in the group in the community and if you don't have a container you know which is now chemical term the Hermetic vessel to you know to really to contain those shadowy unconscious energies they will invert ably act themselves out and destroy the whole scene like what happened with Osho is a perfect example and so that's why you know I'm very you know I have all these groups that have formed that have formed around my work for the last 30 years and one of the key things is developing that hermetic vessel that container so that when there's conflict among members or shadow gets acted out we're able to assimilate it and metabolize it and process it and if we didn't have that container it would it would just the group would get destroyed so I think that's that's an example well I didn't know you had these uh these like the awaking Awakening in the dream groups what are they called yeah yeah yeah exactly they're and they're for people who are Awakening to the dreamlike nature you know and some of the groups the average tenure of each it's a weekly group The Aver average tenure might be 12 years 13 years average each person some people are in the group for 25 years and um you know when it's all people who are like you know in their own process of Awakening and it's an amaz you know it's something it's one part of my contribution it's trying to show hey there's something available when we hang out together with other people who are also Awakening that can potentiate the field and help all of us um yeah I guess I'm kind of curious so I mean you you're not a therapist I mean how have you made a living through this whole 30-year trajectory I mean yeah yeah yeah I mean as you know as an author it's not you it's not easy to make a living by selling books so yeah I get a little income from that but then I've had these groups for 30 plus years and you know I have a private practice and I make clear I'm not a therapist but if people want to talk to me about what Tio or quantum physics you know and so many people do that um that's how I make my living and and the thing which is cool is that you know um this body of work I've created it's getting more and more out to the world every year and it's like it's seeding you know in in the so the psychic soil of humanity um there one way of putting it to the point where you know just wow I don't know if you hear that I've never heard that sound before that ringing so weird anyways um but yeah so no it's gotten it's gotten to the point where I've made you know for the first number of years I was living on a very you know minimal budget but it's not like that anymore now I I make an okay living and I don't have to worry about money that's cool and uh I keep I keep having questions for you that I kind of forget as you're speaking uh which not it's not usual for me um what what's the book that you want to write next are you are you working on another project or you have yeah I am I and it's I'm getting downloads every day and um according you know because I'm really into the work of young and he openly says the greatest discovery of the entire 20th century in the realm of Psychology was what he calls the reality of the psyche that the psyche is real and um but if you ask most youngian they don't even know it's unbelievable to me you know how his work is I don't know um you know there's all these gaps or you know really important gaps of what he was um Tapp into that's not being shared by the yian community and just as a fan of young you know he's my main man that I studied for 40 plus years um so that's what my next book is really going to be about about the profundity of what he was realizing you know about how the psyche not only is it real ontologically real but it's the most fundamentally real thing there is and he was completely switched on to this being a dream he keeps on using the word dreamlike nature and young was also really switched on to AO he didn't have the name but he called it a number of different names you know and um but yeah so I I also point out that I guess Young's last book was the The Flying Saucer myth I think yeah I'm not sure if that was his last book but um you know he took that really really seriously in in a symbolic way that as if it was a dream symbol like the the saucers being like a symbol of psychic wholeness yeah yeah yeah and that we're so we're so alienated from our own self that we could only experience the self in the form of an alien other you know yeah did that mean there was no alien other other than that or uh does he leave open that question yeah he I think he kept that really open you know uh what do you think of do you follow Ed y's followers like Edinger and mie Von fr those people yeah yeah yeah no I before I studied young all I read was head insur and Von France you know was people doing commentaries on his work because I was so intimidated Yeah by you know how complicated his work seemed so I'm a big big fan of both Ur and Von France for sure but then at a certain point you know I began really studying young and it helped me so much because of the inner experiences I was having because I was having night after night these incredible dreams for for for you know just for years and years particularly when I got out of the last hospital in 1982 because I was in deep psychological trouble you know between the abuse from my father and then the psychiatric abuse and you know like he says young says the unconscious compensates you know when you're in trouble when you get one-sided it'll bring you it'll show you the other side and that's what was happening to me didn't you also say that the the wound is the gift yeah yeah yeah well he was very he was one of the major people who taught me about like the archetype of the Healer who's wounded yeah the shaman the wounded healer and that's something I so relate to because I'm so in touch with the depth of my trauma I mean I've been screaming about that I've been in trauma for 40 plus years and you know for the first number of years I saw it as a real problem that I had to like figure out and resolve and then gradually over time I began to recognize well you know this might have to live with this and and then I began to carry the womb differently where it became a portal to my creative gifts yeah I was just reading an essay by you know Jeffrey kpal yeah yeah yeah for sure he talks about how um I mean there's an interesting correlation between people who have psychic or paranormal experience or Channel or mediumship are often people who had some kind of like childhood trauma right something that kind of like opened them up I guess to what Young would call the unconscious or you Steiner would call like the astal or the spirit worlds or something like right oh no that's exactly what happened to me I mean because my whole process when I was describing you know at the beginning of this interview you know about with my father and the and the psy Psychiatric Hospital one way of describing it I was having this direct encounter with archetypal evil and it you know it destroyed my entire family I haven't had a family for over 20 years and it almost killed me but I was fortunate enough to keep my heart open and to cultivate awareness and then by doing that that's how I found my work but yeah like when people have it's almost like you get like so violated or transgressed or something or people who are heroin addicts or alcoholics you descend so deeply into the darkness that if you're fortunate enough to come out you have a gift and what do you think the origin of all this evil is that you're that your you know is in the world and that your father kind of reflected or expressed yeah well it's interesting young talks about evil I mean that's one of the things I appreciate about young he actually talks about evil very you know in an incredible way compared to a lot of people who don't even mention the word and he says that evil it re reconstitutes itself over the generations and that's why in my in my new book on wtio I I point out that in my opinion that the origin of wo is an unhealed trauma you know ancestral trauma that to the extent we haven't metabolized it we're just faded and compelled to unconsciously act it out on the next of kin and it gets transmitted over the generations in that way but that's only part of the answer the other part is that there's something about evil in the equation of the universe that helps us to actualize ourselves and to actualize our intrinsic freedom in a way that if evil didn't exist we wouldn't be able to actualize our nature in in the way we do so in in a certain way and like cabala talks about this and and Steiner talks about this young talks about it that that it's not an error I mean on one hand it is it's just it's a total error it's ignorance and all that but from from from the point of view of the cosmic design it seems to be an intrinsically important factor um I'm talking evil in in the evolution of our species and I point out that in what he that wao it's a Quantum phenomena in that just like light is either a wave or particle depending on how it's observed like wao this mind virus it it contains the deepest evil you know and encoded within it is its own vaccine is its own medicine it's actually helping our species to evolve that if Oro didn't exist we would have to invent it that's how important it is it's the greatest Catalyst for human evolution in the same way that um you know same thing with evil yeah that's interesting I've been going through a bit of a um self-inquiry because I was a big believer in um kind of the evolution of Consciousness I think that's one reason want I do this upcoming seminar on the future of Consciousness um I I'm I'm not as convinced as I was uh you know there was like you know K Ken Wilbur or Jee gser right or Steiner you know barara marks hubard um you know kind of um so many thinkers kind of you know some you know kind of like esoteric some you know late 20th century some kind of Post New Age we've all had this idea that human consciousness is you know sort of gathering power to make sort of a mutational leap or or shift like Jee gser talked about the integral or a perspectival Consciousness and the SP Dynamics people kind of took his lingo and so on but now when I look around I'm really not as convinced I mean you know I think in a way like um like we saw kind of the um kind of you know the quote unquote conscious Community or spiritual culture get kind of like shattered over the last decade um you know with a lot of people becoming conspiracy theorists or getting into qanon or kind of paranoia um you know there's that I don't know if you've checked out the conspirituality podcast yeah no I'm familiar with the conspirituality thing yeah totally and then also of course you know the you know the Fall From Grace of all these even Tibetan llamas or um right right yogis and so on So You Know so I mean maybe that's a necessary cleansing of the decks or something like a clearing of the decks for something new to emerge but I'm curious what your take on that if you have any sense of there being kind of um a trajectory of um evolutionary Consciousness or if this is kind of something else that's happening more of a yeah well no I appreciate the question and here's what comes up like towards the latter part of his life young was saying he underestimated the the darkness the depth of the darkness in you humanity and in the unconscious and I'm Contin because you know I study this stuff this is you know where my interest is I'm continually just my mind just gets blown by the level of unconsciousness in people and in our species and in the world and that being said I also really see and I'm convinced of this and I've been convinced of this every moment for 40 plus years that there is this Awakening of Consciousness or an evolution of Consciousness in potential to use a quantum physics term that you know it's it's not a deterministic universe and it's not written in stone but that um yeah there is a real potential that we already have we already have everything we need to awaken and it's not like oh yeah only if we like if the Messiah comes or this happens no we already possessed everything we need to awaken it's solid question are we going to are is there going to be a sufficient number of people who you know plug in and get switched on and turned on to what's actually available to us and I see that as a potentiality and so does quantum physics it points out that even if something is ridiculously unlikely it could still happen and that gives me a lot of hope you know so I would just caution there's a danger in getting you know and we have all the evidence we need that oh our species is so asleep we're just screwed but if we assume that position and get fixed in that perspective then we're part of the problem as far as I'm concerned that makes sense um before when you're talking about um tra traumatic patterns I was thinking of course about Israel uh I assume that from being from New York and you know with the name Levi that you're also Jewish Ian I'm Jewish I'm Jewish um it seems like that's what happening right now to a great degree you know like the um putting these these um you know I mean not there aren't you know reasons for them to feel they need to protect themselves and so on but you know star starving the population and turning them into giving them the look of gaunt concentration camp survivors as they forage for food you know really does feel like an unconscious kind of acting you know reacting out of this trauma you know well yeah there is an article that I wrote probably 15 years ago or more was one of those times when Israel was was attacking Gaza after there was like a missile that came from Gaza and I'll just give you the title of the article which are really sort of exposed my point of view I call the article Israel is outgassing its unhealed trauma okay and then I it's a long article where I explore the nature of trauma and and I point out that if seen as an individual that what Israel is doing it's clearly trauma ized and it's acting out it's unconscious unhal trauma where it's the perpetrator you know from my point of view it's it's it's completely 100% clear that Israel is committing genocide and by its actions it's actually creating the opposite of its intentions it's trying to make itself safe and it's actually in the process of ensuring that it's going to be destroyed by doing what it's doing that's a Spore print of watio right there um so what what what what can be done in this circumstance it's been very interesting for me because I have a lot of you know Jewish friends and I've seen a bunch of them really shift rightward uh very suddenly um you know and kind of you know are in support of what's happening to a degree that really amazes me uh and I guess they're kind of like just an aspect of this to think there are like group Souls of like ethnic groups or uh you know why why would there be this sort of um falling into the sort of coherence uh around yeah well it's really that's really interesting um you know because the the world we live in now it's filled with propaganda and and and you know this disinformation or misinformation or you know whatever you call it just incredible propaganda and um it seems like we are so open to like you know so many of us unconsciously Outsource our own meaning making and authority and then we take on other people's ideas of what's happening and then we connect when we have this oh there's an alignment oh my neighbor feels the same way oh now we're going to reinforce each other's point of view and that can quickly become a collective psychosis and that just seems like that's part of the of the design of the unconscious psyche of humanity and so I'm not sure you know your question about group Souls I mean that's very interesting because I am of the opinion that on one level we choose to Incarnate again and again to connect with other people who are part of our soul family you know and um young talks about this he calls it because the underlying agreement is is reciprocal individuation we have a commitment to help each other to wake up so we find each other over a number of these lifetimes and I'm not sure how that's playing into this process but it's just really interesting how once there becomes a Collective Agreement about what's happening and then then part of that is an impenetrable bubble gets conjured up where any reflection that's contrary to the agreed upon consensus gets immediately just you know not reflected upon and then the person who's holding up the mirror gets attacked you know and all of this is forms of wo because one another way of describing wo is that when wo is in the field it's not safe to speak you'll get censored you'll get demonetized you'll get deplatformed you know and that's why the importance of speaking our voice our true creative voice um what kind of advice do you have for particularly for younger you know you're you're now I guess you've reached Elder Elder status oh I'm a senior definitely I know it's crazy um what kind of advice do you have for like younger people in their 20s right now who you know seem to be going through a lot of different um yeah yeah Mental Illness but also kind of a sense that there's not much future for them and like the right right no I hear you I know and um I I mean on the one hand I would say definitely keep the faith um but that's such a cliche that's such an easy thing to say but I would also say the most important thing we're all being called and in other words you know in one of my I think like the the newer book that I wrote on wio I you know the thing I say and I wrote this chapter right before the lockdown happened I say that the major archetype that's activated in the collective psyche is the shamanic Arch type and the shaman you know there's not it's not like one would ever choose consciously to be a shaman you'd have to be out of your mind because the suffering is so intense but the shaman and the shaman is the creative artist it is the Wounded healer um the shaman is called by the spirits okay and when a shaman gets called you know if they don't Ascent to the calling that's when they get really sick but if they Ascent to the calling calling then you know the same sponsor of the calling is the source of everything they need to actualize and accomplish the calling so I'm pointing out that we as a species are making a collective descent into the unconscious I mean I think of young he says the big problem of our time is we don't know we're not conscious of what's actually happening and then he says what's actually happening is we are confronted with the darkness of the Soul with the darkness of the unconscious yeah we are making species white a descent into that Darkness you know that's the shamanic Descent of of going through a death rebirth experience and the idea of the shaman is that instead of being caught in that descent in which case they need a shaman and they're really screwed and they just stay sick no they're somehow able to come back into the world and they bear gifts as a result of their initiatory ordeal and what I'm descri in that's all of us you know whether I'm 67 or whether you're early 20s we're all being called to connect there's something that's calling us okay and that's the inner voice that's you can call it the genius the Dion The Muse The Familiar there are a lot of different names for that inner figure that's the higher self and I would just say the most important thing is to really honor that calling and I mean I think about myself when I was having my like experience of like breakdown breakthrough the whole universe was telling me Oh Paul you're mentally ill and in denial of your illness and I knew I wasn't I knew I was being it was so obvious to me and I followed my calling and it wasn't easy and it took years and here I am now for the 30 plus years I'm doing what I love and I'm helping people you know that's an example so I would say for those 20-some year old people to really tune in to how are you being called we all have this role to play It's not that everybody has to be a writer people whatever just a good person or whatever but the idea is is to really have the courage to follow that calling you know and that calling invariably has to do with connecting with the creative because that inner voice that's the sponsor of the calling the um it contains are not yet expressed Creative Energy but if we don't connect with that the word is like daon would be the word young uses that if we don't connect with it consciously it constellates negatively and becomes a demon okay that's important so when you look at somebody like Putin who's like uh you know saber saber R rattling nuclear weapons and seems willing to kind of destroy and obliterate everything if he doesn't get what he wants at any moment um you would see him as kind of our unconscious Collective projection well that's one point of view I mean what you described is Putin Through The Eyes of mainstream propaganda you know the West you know and I would I would always point out to something to people and I've learned this is like the third rail is that oh isn't it interesting you have this perspective on Putin on the vaccine on Israel whatever I go what about if you consider is the perspective that you're holding the perspective that the powers that be the darker powers that be want you to have and that's an interesting question you know because if all of a sudden if I have the realization wait I'm seeing Putin this way or the vaccine this way or Israel this way and that's the way the darker powers that are actually the sponsor of all the evil in the world that's what they want me to think I would question my perspective sure I mean it's a big question you know which are the darker Powers how many darker powers are there but does seem quite obvious to me anyway that you know Russia which is under Putin's dictatorial rule you know ha has been you know talking about use of nuclear weapons in a very almost like Cavalier way see I don't agree at all I I 100% disagree Daniel I I mean because I really study a lot what Putin says and he's been openly saying we do not want to use nuclear weapons that's the last thing we want to use it's the West the the NATO and the United States who's been like you know they've been the ones who've been offering the the idea of use of going nuclear and and then that's provable that's not just some sort of theory and so you know that's just my point of view and I'm happy to to agree to disagree on that yeah I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that one yeah for sure totally in general I I love what you're putting out into the world I'm super happy to be connected with you look forward to to more opportunities to connect and uh yeah anything else you want to share today before maybe we we wind down for today anything top right I mean the only thing that comes up like at the beginning of the interview and I'm not even sure if this is you know before we began getting record we were both tripping out over these times we live in this is the most amazing time and from one point of view it's like yeah we've chosen to Incarnate in this time and I see there's a real potentiality of us just pushing the button and and destroying our species that's a real possibility and I see there's a real possibility you know of us actually actually Awakening sufficiently you know and the other button the the pineal gland button yeah yeah yeah the pineal gland button no I I really like that you know and and this is total quantum physics because you know just I guess I'll end by invoking one more aspect of how amazing quantum physics is you know quantum physics was trying to find the micr structure the building blocks of physical reality and they wound up not being able to find anything physical but they found Consciousness was more fundamental than anything physical and then they coined a term like elementary particle right that that's the the building block and the way they characterize it is that these Elementary particles existed in a state of potentiality at each and every moment every possible potential they could ever manifest they existed in until that next moment they're observed and they actualized one of those potentials and all the others just vaporized and the point is is that if one of those potentials is that our species can actually awaken that's in quantum physics that's saying oh that's completely possible that's completely within the real of possible and I think that's really inspiring when you have that realization that that could happen this very next moment and if you're not envisioning that I would ask then what are you thinking nice one I'm totally envisioning that but it's a delight to uh to hear the the idea vocalized yeah let's Let's uh let's get that Quantum potential realized as soon as possible Right totally absolutely thank you very much Paul it's great to chat with you and I look forward tomorrow for sure same same here Dan really appreciate it thank you thank you thank you okay bye bye
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.