Jalaluddin Rumi says, “What hurts you, blesses you,” and the Covid-19 pandemic was no different. It highlighted the fault lines in our healthcare systems, our social, political and economic structures, and also, humanity’s acute existential fears. As Eckhart Tolle says, “Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt…ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death.”
Why do we fear death when it is such an intrinsic part of life? Because we have forgotten we are an aspect of the higher intelligence of the cosmos. So many of us believe we are isolated beings, separate from nature, God and the universe. This is the original wound; the illusion of duality in all of us. So, by unleashing Covid, perhaps Mother Earth was really asking us to heal the spiritual disconnection at the heart of our current systemic malaise. She was reminding us that we are not just deeply interconnected, but Tat tvam asi – thou art that. Or to quote Tolle again, “We are the universe experiencing itself as a human for a little while.”
The concept of ‘paradoxical unity’ in the Tao Te Ching provides a useful perspective in the face of the fears elicited by Covid. To the Taoists, everything is on a ‘yin-yang’ continuum — light and dark, good and bad. Because we only understand light by comparing it to darkness, the two poles define each other; there is a paradoxical unity because they’re just two sides of the same coin. The goal of life is thus to transcend dualistic judgements and see the unity. This idea of duality-in-unity is also present in Vedic thought as Purush-Prakriti, spirit-matter, and Shiv-Shakti, divine masculine-feminine.
From this perspective, the pandemic has played an important role in humanity’s evolution by challenging us to reflect on our spiritual nature — the unity within diversity, which is where the word ‘universe’ comes from. When we truly internalise this, all fear disappears. Suddenly we’re less resistant to what happens, because we know there’s a higher purpose at play. Harmony is hidden within chaos; sacredness lies within all the destruction. Order comes from disorder, like a forest fire burning away the debris so new life can flourish. As spiritual masters teach us, everything that happens is ultimately for our highest good — even the bad stuff. In fact, the bad stuff is usually what catalyses the biggest learnings, catapulting us to new heights. Suffering has a noble purpose; the raising of human consciousness. Of course, we are afraid of suffering to get to the light, which only creates more resistance — and therefore, more suffering. It is a vicious circle. Fear is far more contagious than any disease that ever plagued the Earth. The only way to step out of fear is to sow the seed of its opposite — trust.
Interestingly, the word ‘cosmos’ means order. Enlightened gurus tell us the universe is anything but random — underneath the illusion of chaos, there is a higher purpose. The Zen saying, “Snow falls, each flake in its appropriate place,” highlights this perfectly.
In Vedic thought, this sacred order is known as dharma, natural law. Sometimes dharma is hard to believe when the world seems so dark and foreboding, but life’s deeper interconnectedness means our labels of good and bad, light and dark are completely illusory. Ultimately, the message of Covid is thus simply to transcend duality to find the unity. We as individuals can embody this learning right now, simply by recognising the oneness of our own sacred nature.
See printed article in The Times of India Speaking Tree
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