When the Most Awake Among Us Fall Asleep: Marc Gafni, His Supporters and Wetiko

Paul Levy
Awakeninthedream.com

In early 2016 a controversy swirling around a charismatic spiritual teacher with a long history of abuse allegations grabbed my attention due to its over-the-top craziness. The more deeply I investigated the situation the more my mind was blown. The teacher’s name is Marc Gafni and he has attracted a remarkable number of renowned leaders defending him as well as many major figures condemning him. A recent spate of publicity, including a 2015 Christmas day article in the New York Times, has brought this situation, to evoke the Academy Award winning movie, into the “spotlight.”

Marc Gafni is a spiritual self-help author and former rabbi who has spent the last several decades attracting enamored followers in various groups and then being repeatedly forced out due to numerous scandals involving abuses of sex, power and money. The most well-known allegations include being accused of sexually abusing a 13-year old girl when he was a rabbinical student, and a 16-year old girl when he was a rabbi and her youth group leader. He was forced to flee Israel in 2006 when several women there went to the police, and his revitalized career spectacularly blew up again in 2011 due to a sex scandal involving a student. There have been countless other allegations of abuse that are less well-known, and based on in-depth research it appears that Gafni has left behind a trail of trauma and destruction, doing damage to many organizations and individuals along the way.

Any of these scandals would have ended the career of most people, and yet miraculously, Gafni has managed to reinvent himself time after time; he continues to deny all allegations, portraying himself as an innocent victim wrongly accused. Rising like a phoenix from each of his previous falls, he has continually attracted support from prominent spiritual teachers and business leaders. Currently Gafni runs a “think tank” in California and is also teaching workshops on sacred sexuality, which is quite ironic and troubling for someone who has a long history of sexual abuse allegations (for close to $6,000 you, too, could study “prayer sexing” with Marc Gafni and learn how to be “fucked open to God.” Editors note: Shortly after the publication of this article, this phrase was removed from his website). 

What has particularly grabbed my attention is that many of the players involved in the Gafni situation are larger than life archetypal figures, including Ken Wilber - “the Einstein of consciousness,” Barbara Marx Hubbard - “the grande dame of conscious evolution,” and John Mackey - founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, called the “prophet of conscious capitalism.” The fact that some of the allegedly most brilliant and spiritually awake among us are themselves supporting Gafni is showing us the challenge of what we are dealing with. Not merely a personal situation, it is as if central casting has sent the perfect figures to embody the deeper archetypal process that is getting acted out.

What is striking is that the crazy-making dynamic swirling around Gafni precisely maps onto a deeper archetypal process that I have witnessed many times, both in my personal life and in the world at large. It is this deeper pattern, where intelligent, highly accomplished people with the best of intentions “protect the abuser”—that I’d like to illumine. A deeper archetypal pattern appearing like this is an incredible opportunity, a sign that a deeper level of the unconscious—both personal and collective—is available for potential integration if we recognize what is being revealed. 
 
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See also: Barbara Marx-hubbard and New Age Fascism Part I

The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity

Paul Levy
Reality Sandwich 


The following is Part One in a series. Read Part Two here. 

In the book Columbus and other Cannibals, indigenous author Jack D. Forbes lucidly explores a psychological disease that has been informing human self-destructive behavior that Native American people have known about for years. After reading his book, it was clear to me that he was describing the same psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I wrote about in my book, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis. I introduce the idea that from the dawn of human history our species has fallen prey to a collective psychosis which I call malignant egophrenia. Speaking about this very same psychic epidemic, Forbes writes, "For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox."[i] Indigenous people have been tracking the same "psychic"[ii] virus that I call malignant egophrenia for many centuries and calling it "wetiko," a Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others. Professor Forbes, who was one of the founders of the Native American movement during the early sixties, says, "Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease."[iii] Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a "psychosis" in the true sense of the word as being a "sickness of the soul or spirit." Though calling it by different names, Forbes and I are both pointing at the same illness of the psyche, soul and spirit that has been at the root of humanity's inhumanity to itself.

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Duped By the Beast of War

Paul Levy
Awaken in the Dream

As if living in a never-ending “war-time,” the war drums are once again fast approaching on the horizon. The country I live in, the United States of America, already involved in multiple wars – some overt, others covert – is threatening to attack another sovereign nation, this time Syria. The whole thing is totally insane; our government’s reliance on military solutions is pathological,[1] a form of mental illness.[2] It certainly seems as if our country doesn’t know how to imagine solutions outside the paradigm of war. The fact that we, as a species, are investing our creative genius to conjure up an endless war which is unceasingly draining us of our most precious resources is complete and utter madness. We are truly in the midst of a global collective psychosis of epic proportions, what the Native Americans call “wetiko psychosis.”

War is really an epidemic of madness. Throughout human history, war is the most violent and destructive activity in which we human beings have been engaged. It is an irrational phenomenon that can’t be stopped or controlled with rational arguments, for its source is the shared unconscious of humanity. Author Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, writes, “However and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, and we like to say of things we do not fully understand, ‘a life of its own.’”[3] In war our species has created an out-of-our-control Frankenstein monster that has developed a seemingly autonomous and independent “life of its own.” When I first read Ehrenreich’s words, I immediately thought of “wetiko” (which, simply put, refers to the spirit of evil), which I had written extensively about in my book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Originating in the psyche,[4] wetiko – a psychospiritual disease of the soul – similarly develops an apparently autonomous and independent life and will of its own. The more I studied Ehrenreich’s work, the more I realized that the beast of war is a virulent incarnation of the wetiko bug writ large on the world stage.

An out-of-control robotic golem, the war machine develops a seeming autonomy that (just like the wetiko virus) generates its own self-sustaining momentum; war is simultaneously its own cause and effect. Seen as a cultural trait, war has evolved in the way that it has simply because it is advantageous to and profits from itself. In a self-perpetuating vicious and violent cycle of infinite regress that is a self-fulfilling feedback loop, the only defense against war is war itself. Thus war metastasizes and spreads, steamrolling all peaceful solutions under its relentless, circular and self-justifying logic. Once the cycle of violence starts and the dogs of war are unleashed, there is simply no stopping nor predicting it. A force of nature unlocked, once the Pandora’s box of war is opened, there is no coaxing the genie back into the bottle. Social scientists, in mathematical studies looking at the outbreaks of wars and national decisions to participate in wars, have shown strong indications of epidemicity, which is to say that war spreads in patterns identical to those of disease outbreaks. War is a living flesh and blood example of how human societies can fall prey to systems of behavior that are entirely of their own creation that can sweep up and devour all who are involved. This is reminiscent of the legendary resurrected tiger which devours the magician who restored it to life out of its skeletal bones. In war we have fallen prey to the power of our own misguided magic.

The first principle of psychological method is that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition until we first move imagination into its heart. Due to its traumatizing nature, many of us don’t even know how to think about war. Interestingly, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during much of the Vietnam War, reflecting upon its horrors, writes, “we can now understand these catastrophes for what they were: essentially the products of a failure of imagination.” The same phrase – “failure of imagination” – was used during the Bush Administration as an excuse for why they weren’t prepared for the 9/11 attacks. If war escapes the reach of our imagination, it will dictate, enforce and establish dominion over all of us. First and foremost an act of imagination, war enlists our own imagination to become an agent of negation and destruction. In modern times, the majority of people apparently find the most decisive and captivating manifestations of power to be in that which destroys, rather than that which creates; this is an expression of collective subconscious and un-integrated trauma. The imagination of a people as a whole must be conscripted and reshaped in order to prepare a reluctant citizenry for war. War, and the weapons of collective death that are its accessories, are the products of the greatest creative power operating within the human spirit – the human imagination; and human imagination, it must be added, is capable of getting rid of them. Since our species has invented war, we can also invent and manifest peace. If we can’t imagine this, then what are we thinking? An impaired imagination, unable to even imagine peace, is simultaneously a cause and effect of the proliferation of war. While on one level the war we are involved in uses such things as bombs, the real war is a war on consciousness (see my article “The War on Consciousness”), which is nothing other than a war on the imagination itself. A debilitated imagination fundamentally weakens humanity, making it easier prey to be manipulated by a predatory elite.

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The 'Wetiko Virus' and Collective Psychosis: Interview With Paul Levy

Comment: The excellent Mr. Paul Levy who was interviewed by the SOTT team
a few months ago. Spiritually informed political activism (SIPA) at its finest.

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New Culture Podcasts with SOTT Talk Radio on BlogTalkRadio 

The 'Wetiko Virus' and Collective Psychosis: Interview With Paul Levy

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 Evil 

In his books Paul explores and 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”. 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."

Paul's website is Awakeninthedream.com