I think we all knew this was coming at some level…. Increasing population, overuse of resources, intensive farming, high rates of medication, extensive overseas travel, climate change, focus only on economic growth…. the list goes on. Intuitively we knew this was not sustainable.
And now Covid is here. Even this follows on from a slow burn from other viruses, like SARS, that started but didn’t quite ‘get out’. This one did.
Covid is hitting us close, at our health. Everything else is arms length away and we don’t have to deal with it ‘today’, but health. Well, we can’t do much without that.
Ill health brings up fear, and the fear is close, right in our bodies and those of our loved ones.
This crisis. It’s real now.
And what are we doing about it, on a world scale? It appears we are dealing with it at the level of the virus. Trying to medicate it out so we can ‘go back’ to how things were. Do we really think this is going to work? I honestly don’t think so.
In my view global Covid can be seen as an invitation to a bigger evolutionary jump for us, which may just show itself as an existential Spiritual Crisis.
To drill down into this the following example explains a relevant health theme which opens us into a more spiritually based way of thinking.
An individual hen is kept in a small bare cage. It is given food and water and lays an egg each day which is collected. With this lifestyle the hen cannot do what hens naturally do; scratch, dust bathe, chat to other hens, argue, mate and breed. In its cage it pecks itself incessantly, loses all its feathers, bleeds, scabs, gets ticks. The hen looks, and presumably feels terrible and doesn’t live that long.
The bloods and biochemistry of this caged hen can be measured and the results would show that the cells are unhealthy or not in the normal range. The hen could be treated for this and given medicine to correct the imbalance at the cellular level. This may provide some temporary relief but that medicine will need another one to counteract the imbalance of that and on and on it goes.
Meanwhile if you take the hen out of the cage, put it with other hens in a natural environment and let it live its life all the things that were wrong with it will come right. We can measure the bloods and biochemistry again now and they would all now be in the healthy range but the healing has come from a much more holistic place, with the cellular chemistry being a secondary reflected factor.
I am not suggesting that humans are animals living in cages. This example just shows that health does not originate at the level of the cells. It ends up there, but it does not originate there.
So with Covid, we can try to medicate at the level of the cells but without the larger picture, is pretty futile.
This is a much larger problem and needs a higher and broader solution.
But of course, we humans don’t need to regress. We have come so far as a world. Thanks to the rise in technology, science, democracy, communication and travel over the last 150 years, we are on the brink of becoming one global universal humanity which is amazing and positive evolution. But just right now we are at a crunch point. Our evolving one humanity is suffering with a global illness, its effects reaching into every pocket of society in every country, and we are struggling to cope.
I believe there is one crucial piece that can help, and it is time. The integration of a new form of Religion/Spirituality.
This new form of religion and spirituality will bring us naturally back (like the hen example) to the understanding that physical health is effect, not causation.
How will it do this? All basic religions agree on one primary point. We humans did not create ourselves. We are a balanced secondary part of a larger whole. From here we can expand our awareness. This larger whole is made up of ‘energetic perfected light’ which can be called Goodness, Love or Truth; and this light expresses itself in a myriad of different forms, humans being one of these.
(Metaphysics is catching up here, realising that everything is energy – what we see as material is actually just dense packed energy)
So with Religion/Spirituality humans tune in/pray or balance to this larger perfected energy. And this balance brings everything into alignment in a kind of energetic hierarchy. For us we are balanced on the higher, as yet unseen subtle energies of love, hope, trust, fidelity, truth, conscience, humility, charity, grace to the slightly denser level of individual emotions and feelings, and denser still the cells and biochemistry of the body. All balanced in one great concord.
Life does its thing. Humans, being naturally inspired by the higher beatific aims, transform ideas into relationships, technology, communication, democratic systems etc down in the denser material world. All great, helpful and needed. But remember, the universe has a perfected order. Higher qualities will always supersede the denser material reflection – groups/technology/science always need to serve the higher ideals that they were created from. Basic religions teach this when they advise us not to commit Idolatry (or place material forms before spiritual ideals). If we get it wrong and try in vain to have the material lead, these forms will disintegrate, dissolve or transform into the spiritual ideals, sometimes in extreme ways. This is how the world has, does, and will always work.
To really evolve as one humanity, I believe we need basic Religion/Spirituality in a new form as an understanding of our secondary nature or humility in the world, working with technology and science in its correct order.
There are new spiritual teachers around now who are re explaining the age-old religious tenant that God has to come first. This God being Consciousness/Universal Energy/Goodness/Light; and human nature, will-power, technology, science and manmade feats sit naturally under this.
Covid can be seen as a call to rebalance our world. To bring back the central goal of religion/spirituality where humans are eternally balanced with the whole at the middle point of light. Everything else reflects as secondary material form naturally from there, including the cells and biochemistry of biological world. From this balanced middle point, we can continue to evolve.
I believe this balance is coming but the universal Revelation of it is a process, and takes a little time.
A truly Spiritually Sustainable world is possible, and we are beginning.