Humanity's Hijacked: The Hidden Parasite In Our Minds
“Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host"
- Bernard Beckett -
The Hidden Parasite In Our Minds
Did you know there's a fungus that turns ants into zombies?
It starts when a spore of a certain cordyceps fungi lands on an ant. Quietly, invisibly, it slips inside and spreads. Once it's in control, it steers the ant's mind and body towards a single goal. Climb high, clamp down, and die in a position where the fungus can sprout from the ant's head and rain spores upon the colony below.
The ant isn’t even aware it’s happening and its death ensures the process continues. 😳
What if something like that happened to humans?
Not a literal infection of a parasitic fungus, mind you. But, what if there was something like an idea, a thought pattern, or a way of being that worked just like a parasite, becoming part of our collective mind and driving our behaviour towards our own destruction?
Would we know it? Could we recognize it? If so, how?
Let’s figure this out:
Q: What noticeable patterns do parasites exhibit?
A: Well, they have nothing to offer and so they just take without giving back. They benefit at the expense of the host. They don't kill the host outright. They just keep it healthy enough to keep feeding on it. They hide, they blend in, they work undetected in the shadows. Parasitic behaviours gradually drain life force, seek to survive at all costs, engage in exploitation, deception, domination, and compulsive consumption. All parasitic behaviours are built upon a win-lose model. Their inherent nature is as an embodiment of fear; chronically afraid of being seen and discovered for what they are, their presence is ironically a threat to their own existence.
Q: Where might we look for these patterns in humanity?
A: Well, if there was a parasitic element affecting human thought, it certainly wouldn't announce itself. It would hide inside the behaviours we accept as ‘normal' (but aren't healthy) and would spread through, and be sustained by, our culture. Parasite-like behaviours would be passed down from generation to generation and have us complying with unhealthy rules of behaviour that no one questions or even remembers making.
Kind of like the story of those monkeys in the cage. Maybe you've heard it?
The monkey experiment
Scientists placed five monkeys in an enclosure with a bunch of bananas hanging at the top. The first monkey who climbed up to grab them got hosed down by a researcher with cold water …and so did all the innocent monkeys. After a few rounds, none of them dared go near the bananas. Then the researchers swapped out one monkey for a new one. The new guy, unaware of the punishment, made a move for the bananas. The others beat him up before he even got close. No cold water required.
One by one, the original monkeys were gradually replaced with new ones who had never been hosed down. Each time a new monkey tried for the bananas, it was promptly beaten by the group and learned very quickly: don't go for the bananas.
This behaviour continued until all of the original monkeys were replaced and, eventually, the second generation were replaced with a third. None of the monkeys in the cage now had never actually been exposed to cold water by the researchers, nor the generation of monkeys before them. And yet, all of these monkeys would stop any monkey who tried to climb for the bananas …without ever really knowing (or questioning) why. It was simply the culture within the cage.
Why do we do what we do?
In psychology, it’s well known that behaviour follows belief. A belief is something we are convinced is real and true and can be trusted to act upon. Since our brain’s primary drive is survival, we always do whatever we believe works to keep us alive, safe, and achieving our goals. And, the most impactful beliefs are the ones we hold about ourselves.
In his book Psycho Cybernetics, Dr Maxwell Maltz shared his discovery of the ‘self-image’ and said it defines a person’s “area of the possible”. If you don’t believe you can do something, you won’t. Our self-image is the invisible box of limitations we each live within.
Your self-image is an organized system of all the beliefs you hold about yourself. It’s:
who you believe you are (role/identity) and,
what you believe you can and can’t do (capability).
As a child, you came to build your idea of who you were (your self-image) by interacting with the world around you and doing your best to make sense of how things relate to each other. This means that your self-image and your world-view are reflections of each other and part of the same system. And so, your beliefs about yourself also reflect your beliefs about the world. For example, if you feel confident and capable of meeting your needs, the world seems like a pretty safe place to you. But if you doubt yourself and feel you’re not able to meet your needs, the world will seem like a pretty threatening place. ‘Who you are’ is always who you believe yourself to be in relation to the world around you and the people in it.
The self-image is the best hiding place
If I was a mind-parasite, I’d hide inside a person’s self-image because who people believe themselves to be acts as the lens they look at the world through. That lens determines how they make sense of things and decide what actions to take. Most people don’t even know they’re looking through a lens at all. They just think that what they are seeing is real and true and then they behave accordingly.
As a parasite taking over over a human mind, this would be my control centre, not just because you wouldn’t know I was there, but because you’d think my commands were your own thoughts. As a bonus, your self-image, being a part of the Self, is protected by the self-preservation program in your brain and nervous system. It’s the safest place for a mind-parasite to hide. It's a virtual fortress! I would be in a position to shape your personal reality.
Your beliefs create your reality
Ever see a rope and believe it’s a snake? Your body reacts as though it's a real snake. You feel the truth of it. But it’s still a rope. And, the moment you realize it’s just a rope, your belief about it is changes and so does your body’s reaction to it. It calms down.
Belief in a threat = Stressed body
Belief in safety = Calm body
BELIEF is the control centre of the body.
What you feel at any moment is your nervous system adapting to your belief about reality - regardless of how well that belief is actually aligned with reality.
Yet, whatever you are feeling at any moment is still a real experience for you. Your reality is whatever you are aware of and experiencing at any moment.
Your reality is the only reality you can ever know. Ever.
And as your beliefs change, so does your reality. You only ever live in your own unique world -shaped by your beliefs- a personal world of your own making.
Your beliefs = Your reality.
Whatever shapes your beliefs, shapes your reality.
What is shaping your view of the truth? Who do allow to influence your thinking, and why?
Trauma makes your self-image vulnerable to mind-parasites
While trauma can be a very complex topic, in very simple terms: Trauma = Pain.
Trauma is the result of receiving an injury. And, of course, that result is most always pain; not just physical pain but also mental and emotional pain. A traumatic event has the power to corrupt our self-image if any beliefs we have about ourselves are negatively altered as a result of the injury.
A quick brain lesson:
The brain loves conserving energy and uses memory of past experiences to help make sense of the present moment, anticipate what’s coming, and then decide upon what best action to take next. It does this by translating lived experiences into a series of step-by-step instructions which are the stored as a type of long-term memory. Neuroscientists call this a “procedural memory”.
It’s not a memory we recall consciously but rather, one we remember by feel. It’s an automation that activates the nervous system directly without your conscious awareness or permission. (Think 'muscle memory' here, as an example, which applies to your skills. We can tie our shoes or ride a bike without having to think about it. The body remembers.)
Beliefs, or belief systems, are also a type of procedural memory. They are lightning-fast automations for how you interpret reality. They automate how you pay attention so you can immediately know how safe you are and decide what you need to do next.
The trouble with trauma and memory:
When you have a traumatic experience, it is a situation where you were injured and unable to stop it from happening. If your brain translates this painful experience into a step-by-step instruction for future reference, and it encodes information about your inability to protect yourself as an inherent flaw of your being, then the doors to your core beliefs about ‘self’ open up and a corrupted file is inserted into your self-image. This corruption happens when we make ‘incapability’ a part of our core identity. We identify as being powerless.
At this point a whole variety of painful self-defeating core beliefs can develop from this one root, like: “I'm not enough”, “I'm inadequate”, “I'm unworthy”, “I don't belong”, “I don’t matter”, “I’m powerless”, “I am useless”, “I’m a burden”, “I am a pain”, etc.
These corrupted codes in the self-image act like parasites invisibly compromising your well-being from the inside. Being part of your self-image (your identity), they are well-positioned to steer you to adopt parasite-like behaviour. Their thoughts become your thoughts and now you're thinking like a parasite as you see the world through the scratched lens of self-defeating beliefs: suddenly everything around you poses a threat which you need to protect yourself from. God forbid you should be seen for who you truly are - can you say 'Imposter Syndrome'?
The mother of all mind parasites
Humanity is a traumatized species and it has been for a very long time. You can tell by our constant wars and destructive behaviour. We are like a slowly dying tree suffering from a parasitic root infection. And, the name of the parasite infecting humanity might surprise you because it's too friendly sounding a word to accurately represent how harmful it truly is: Shame.
Shame is different from guilt. Guilt is healthy. Shame is not. Guilt says, “I did something wrong,” and its purpose is to inspire us to make a course correction. We apologize and we take accountability for our actions and then we do what we can to correct our mistake. This is the value of guilt. It seeks to make things right.
But somehow we've become convinced that shame has the same purpose as guilt.
It doesn’t!
We already have guilt to do its job.
Shame is not natural. It is an unnatural corruption of our core operating system: the self-image. Instead of seeking to make things right, shame seeks to make us wrong. Unlike guilt, Shame doesn't say, “I did something wrong”. No, it says, “I am wrong”.
Think about that for a moment. “I am wrong”. This is an identity statement. As far as the brain’s computer coding is concerned, this belief is equivalent to, “my being is wrong”, and, “It's wrong that I am” and, “I should not be”.
This thought alone is a threat to our survival instinct.
Now, to help us see it better, let's call it 'the viral shame parasite' because it behaves like a parasitic virus; like a computer virus within the software of our minds.
Remember the rope we believed was a snake? It's the reminder that our beliefs govern our nervous system. The feeling we experience when the viral shame parasite is active ...is pain. The nervous system is incapable of defending against internal threats of: “I am worthless, I am a burden, I am not important, and I should not be”, etc., because these threats are coming from within the very identity that the nervous system is wired to protect! This is very clever hijacking by a mind-virus bent on self-destruction.
When these parasitic beliefs spread, like rapidly duplicating viruses, they dominate people's thinking - making them anxious, hopeless, and depressed ...even committing suicide. That self-destruction is the inevitable internal collapse of 'self' due to parasitic overload.
The viral shame parasite is never a voice of logic or reason. It is a hijacker of the nervous system that turns a person against oneself and others. It is fear incarnate. Everything is a threat. Chronic stress is its aura.
It comes from wrongly adopting pain as part of one's identity. Pain is Nature's alarm calling our conscious attention to an area of ourselves where our health and wholeness is being compromised. But when we adopt pain as "us", then we misperceive the message. That is the corruption in the code. A person can’t actually BE pain. A person can receive pain and be in pain because pain is an experience. But pain is not an identity.
However, when we feel like we are a pain to others, we feel unworthy of their love and attention. We feel like we're just "not ____ enough" (fill in the blank) and "I can't" becomes our mantra. We feel inherently inadequate and incapable.
The viral shame parasite damages the very lens we use to look at life through. It has us seeing our presence as a source of pain to others so, we always run the risk of rejection - which the nervous system takes as a constant threat: other people = potential threat. It can lead to chronic stress and social anxiety. With repetition, it becomes something that feels 'normal' and 'like me', making it unnoticeable and not regarded as something that can actually be changed.
Our defensive downturn into adopting the parasite's mindset
One reactive way our nervous system guards itself against the parasitic belief of “I am wrong” is to reflexively avoid it with the fearful belief of, “I need to be right”. But this has us playing right into the hands of the viral shame parasite and we are now playing by its rules. Now it is in control.
We will feel the need to be right as an urge to prove our worth, to be perfect, to compete against others, to dominate other people, to control them, and to control situations. The need to be right is driven solely by the fear of being wrong. We only fear being wrong when being wrong is perceived as a threat. The viral shame parasite keeps this threat constantly in place.
Trauma is the medium which this parasite uses to spread itself through humanity. It makes humans engage in traumatizing behaviours and normalizing them - making them part of the culture. We say, "That's life. It's normal."
But normal is never a good measure of healthy. Yet, somehow, we seem to value 'normal' over 'healthy'. This is part of the parasite's hijacking: valuing conformity and fear over health.
The need to be right is the underlying cause of all conflict and war. The viral shame parasite hijacked humanity a long time ago and has had us controlled this whole time by taking on parasite-like behaviours like benefiting at the suffering of others, looking out only for ourselves, seeking to dominate, control, divide and conquer.
If we allow ourselves to be divided, then we allow ourselves to be conquered.
In the end, if we are divided, it’s the parasitic virus of shame that wins by convincing us to do it to ourselves, to embody it.
Shame divides, separates, isolates, and desolates. ( ...sounds like hell.)
We have been the unwitting victims of an infiltration of self-perpetuating fragments of incomplete code called "shame" causing us to adopt pain as part of our identity and allowing fear to dominate our decisions as it divides Humanity from the inside out.
But, when we no longer allow ourselves to be divided, we can no longer be conquered.
Shedding the parasite of the mind
If I am willing to look closely, there's a way I can spot, and begin to stop, the parasitic pattern of deep shame.
If the credo of a parasite is, “for me to survive, something else has to suffer”, I can spot it within my own divisive thinking by asking myself questions like:
In what ways am I benefiting at someone else's expense?
In what ways am I taking without giving back?
In what ways am I trying to control others instead of collaborate with them?
In what ways am I rejecting or abandoning others?
In what ways am I happy that someone else is suffering?
In what ways am I feeling the need to be right and make someone else wrong?
In what ways do I feel entitled to something without offering anything in return?
My answers to these questions shine a light upon the deep shame parasite’s hijacking of my mind and behaviour. My awareness is power. It gives me a new choice and I can now choose to reverse the process with questions like:
In what ways am I being of service to others?
In what ways am I being generous and kind?
In what ways am I seeking to make other people feel seen, heard, held and understood?
In what ways am I looking to collaborate with others for our mutual well-being?
In what ways am I feeling connected and seeking connection with others?
Nature thrives on reciprocity. Real health and vitality is radiant, not extractive.
Wholeness is another word for ‘Health’. If being divided has us conquered and sick, then being together has us thriving as a healthy humanity. Systems that sustain life don't need to dominate to survive, they just need to work together.
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too), those who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively, have prevailed."
- Charles Darwin -
And that might be the most powerful insight in this whole thought experiment.
There's no need for us to fight ourselves; just become aware of ourselves. Parasites depend on hiddenness. Awareness reveals them and begins the cleanse.
Now that we can see the pattern, we can actually become something new, together.
An awakened species that remembers how to heal. Together.
And chooses to.
© 2025 Trent Janisch - All Rights Reserved
