Sandra: I have read the recent ShiningWorld newsletter and loved what James had to say about the Self’s perspective to the coronavirus as the anti-virus. I am curious though how to see this global situation that the virus has caused from a personal perspective. Can you help me with that?
Sundari: As James pointed out, from the Self’s perspective, nothing is happening, there is no “life” or “death.” Life is eternal, so no virus and no threat. The dream of Maya is known to be only apparently real and we interact with it as such. It is not that we deny the existence of the apparent reality; we follow dharma and live with what is happening both on a personal and global level. But we are not sucked into the dramas. We are neither attached to living nor dying, because we are not identified with the body. If there ever was any doubt how lucky we are as Vedantins to have Self-knowledge, now it is abundantly clear.
The Chrysalis of Change
The word “disaster” originally meant “ill-starred,” or “under a bad star.” We have had too many disasters to count in the history of this dream we are all living on planet Earth, yet perhaps the strangest reaction to the current situation is that it should surprise us. The forces of destruction and resurrection are ever-present, they are eternal forces or principles. Inherent in all destruction is the birth of new life and vice versa. That is the nature of the field we live in. Destruction changes the world and our view of it, opening up the way for the birth of the “new” in an endless cycle of apparent change.
But when change comes this fast, we cannot resist and are swept away by its floodwaters. It is terrifying and overwhelming for many. The first lesson that destruction teaches us is that everything is connected and that we have no control over what happens and never did. But though the sudden change of any magnitude is always painful, it also always offers great gifts. In many ways great and small, we are already seeing many “miracles” as the full force of what this means for us registers. The world we once lived in is gone yet new birth is already showing its first tentative shoots.
An intensified awareness of mortality makes us wake up to our own lives and the preciousness of life. For those identified with the body, the definition of “we” changes as our sense of self generally comes from the people we touch and the world around us we contact. Right now, we are all forced into isolation, locked out of the world we once knew. It disappeared seemingly overnight leaving many reeling in shock. None of us know what we will find when we return to it. What I think is immediately obvious and positive is the unifying factor – even those who are most fortunate materially are in the same boat as everyone else.
Maybe you have the money to escape to your private island or underground hideout stockpiled with supplies, but the effects of this change will reach you wherever you go. There is no escape. The threat we face recognizes no special boundary or elitist position and levels the playing field. We all have no choice but to find another version of who we thought we were and how we relate to the world we live in. This is very hard for most, especially for those among us who are not inclined to Self-inquiry or inquiry of anything much at all other than securing our own needs and desires.
What is also wonderful is that times of such immense change offer us a unique kind of clairvoyance, seeing with absolutely clear vision. The veil of ignorance is momentarily lifted which allows us to see things from the Big Picture, or God, perspective. It’s like we are suddenly alone and naked in a room with several hundred-watt bulbs blasting away every photon of darkness. As much as the light blinds us it forces us to see what is hidden in the shadowy landscape of our own minds. We see everything “inside” and “outside” of ourselves psychologically, spiritually, politically, economically, socially, ecologically, all in Technicolor, surround sound and on an IMAX screen. It’s impossible to turn away or shut our eyes to our strengths, our weaknesses, our corruption, what matters and what doesn’t, on every level of our existence.
But the most significant consequences of disasters are not immediately or directly visible and take a long time to unfold. We are in the early stages of this disaster and in a strange and rather wonderful kind of stillness. Who knows how bad it will be ultimately or how long it will take to get out of it. We are all living a shared reality right now, and it is in the land of “I don’t know.” God, the Creator of the Field, however you see it, as always, holds all the cards. The outcome of disasters is always unknown to us as is everything else. But disasters offer a unique kind of conflict that takes place while things that were inaccessible and frozen solid suddenly become open and fluid to both the best and worst possibilities. We are both utterly becalmed and in a state of profound change.
In many ways this is a state that applies to us whenever we step out of duality and face the true essence of our innermost non-dual being. Self-inquiry is so challenging because it renders who we once thought we were more and more insubstantial, and eventually dissolves that identity entirely. It can be terrifying for the ego. The analogy I love which applies very well to inner transformation, as well as the global situation we are in right now, is the caterpillar entering its chrysalis stage.
When it pupates, the caterpillar dissolves itself quite literally into liquid. In this state, what was once a caterpillar and what will be one day be a butterfly is neither. What exists is an inchoate state, a living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyze the soup, transforming it into something totally new, something that seemingly never existed before. But what was inherent in the essence of the soup, a beautiful butterfly, was always potentially there, just unmanifest. This is what happens to our identity when we dissolve the illusion of our separate “small self” and enter the unbounded oceanic non-dual Self. We lose the limited identity and gain our unlimited identity. We are collectively in the chrysalis stage now, and I pray that what emerges from this incubation period are the imaginal cells that manifest the best of us both as the individual and as the true essence of our unlimited Self.
The Individual Perspective
From a personal perspective, there is a firehose of confusing information thrown at us daily, and it’s hard to know what to believe. The fear around our current global situation is understandable, up to a point. A certain amount of fear right now is smart, although the jury is still out on whether the whole world has grossly under or over-reacted to the actual threat the virus poses. We simply don’t have all the facts. We have a whole lot of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. A lot of the science emerging does not seem to match the hysteria. As usual, the media have made a field day of propagating fear. If one is prepared to take an objective view of what we do know so far, it seems that this pandemic is as much a pandemic of faulty testing for the virus as anything else. It is resulting in incorrect reporting of numbers actually infected, either over or under, and equally of reported deaths. We may be conflating much data with the virus which will turn out to be wrong. And it is possible that the fear confirmation bias has skewed our assessment of the actual threat by magnitudes.
It may well turn out that the “cure” has more devastating effects long-term than the actual virus. We just don’t know right now, and we may never know the whole picture for sure. What is clear is that it is wise to err on the side of caution. Precaution is one of the values that Self-knowledge encourages us to cultivate, which is to trust the immortal Self you are, but also to tether your camel. Although we know we are not the body, there are practical things we must take care of; it is our duty to respond appropriately to what the situation requires of us. Nobody wants to get sick or make anyone else sick. Though we do not have the whole picture yet, many people are dying, that is certain. Of what exactly is not so certain. Many people are always dying, let us not lose sight of that.
The greatest challenge is not to give in to irrational fear. There is no need to become neurotic about the situation, because fear and stress create as great a burden on our immune systems as the virus itself. Perhaps the hardest thing for most to come to terms with right now is that control over our lives has been so severely curtailed. We are all made prisoners of the situation, at least on the physical level. Whether we are prisoners of it mentally is another matter entirely. As in all things, there are upsides and downsides to the situation. I believe the greatest gift it offers is that it allows us all the opportunity to reassess our unexamined ideas of what’s really important. “Normality” is suspended, at least for a brief moment. Life has slowed down enough for us to see clearly how shockingly irrelevant so much is that we usually focus on, consider “important” and chase after. The word “crisis” in medical terms is the crossroads a patient reaches at which they will either take the road to recovery or to death. Humanity is at a collective crossroads, and it’s been long in coming. Where to from here?
Incredibly, we are all forced to be still, stripped of our usual distractions and “things to do.” We have come face to face with ourselves, there is no place to hide. Every day is the same, nowhere to go, no decisions to make, nothing much to do. It’s Groundhog Day for the foreseeable future. The earth is breathing a huge sigh of relief from the temporary respite and showing very visible signs of recovery. But for many who require noise and activity to survive their own minds, the global silence is frightening and overwhelming. If your mind is not your friend, this time will be hell for you. It is definitely a necessity to practise mind management and especially, karma yoga.
Karma yoga is acting appropriately to the situation at hand in an attitude of gratitude. Most importantly, it is surrendering the results to the Field of Existence, which appreciated or not by you takes care of all your needs, ALL the time. If it was never obvious to you that you never were in control of the results to begin with, that will come home to you now in a big way. This is a time for us to examine what we value most, to how much we take for granted, how much we do not pay attention to or are grateful for in our frenetically busy lives.
Perhaps more than anything it is a time to examine our attitude to the meaning of life and to how identified we are with the body. Death is always staring us in the face, but right now the fear of imminent death has made that fact a bit too uncomfortably obvious, for some. The most profound transformation disaster offers is realizing that we can lose our lives from one day to the next. And in accepting how fragile life is, we see clearly that we want to live a better, more aware life because to be worth living we must live life well for all, not just for “me.”
Disasters never fully end, and forever change our future in crucial ways. In the aftermath of a disaster, a change of consciousness and priorities are powerful forces. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be what they were at the beginning of this year. The reality unfolding may well bring economic devastation for many, but it is also a rich opportunity for a global reset, to see the ignorance that normally shields us from the Big Picture. For those whose heads have up till now resided comfortably in places where the sun does not shine, it is hard to deny that things must change. Regardless of those trying to profit from these times, political and economic changes that would have been unthinkable previously are happening at unprecedented speed, showing just how much we can achieve when we get our act together and agree on what’s important.
On the social level, there is generally much to commend people for their response to the situation globally. Many people are surprising themselves with innate coping skills they never knew they had, becoming kinder and more aware of how connected we all are. I consider myself realistically optimistic about what humanity will learn from this. But the sad thing is that many people are indignantly waiting for things to “get back to normal” so that they can go back to their usual, dare I say, oblivious, selfish ways. The question is, how normal is the way the world has been living? Perhaps the real problem is the fact that we have normalized the abnormal for so long, we don’t know what normal looks like anymore. Hopefully, a much wiser attitude emerges from this, and maybe things will never be quite the same again in a positive way.
Hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering because we are complex creatures and because hope is not blinkered optimism that everything will be fine regardless. Hope offers us the clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts both worth fighting for and the possibility of bringing about needed change. One of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck and that all we need to do is return to things as they were. What we all need to accept is that “normal” life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings. It was an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality.
Yet ignorance is incredibly tenacious and highly efficient. It makes us complacent, forgetful and easily seduced by the seeming comfort of a system that indulges our every whim. Why worry if it’s not our problem? Well, it is our problem and it always has been, which may be news for many. Time will tell how we come out of this, and more importantly, if we stay out of it. Along with an enlightened psychological approach that combats the psychological virus of fear itself, it is time to examine our values with regard to how we have been living on all levels, not just socially, psychologically and technologically, but very importantly, with regard to what we eat and where that food comes from.
A Collective Nervous Breakdown or Armageddon?
When the virus first appeared in China, like many others I wondered what all the fuss was about. After all, there have always been viruses capable of killing us; is this one truly any worse? We must all die from something. The media storm seemed blown out of proportion, more than a little hysterical. It still does, and there is no off button. For a while, the threat seemed so far away, “just” a consequence of another race’s awful predilection for exotic meat and lax sanitation practices. It is quite probable that the virus originated in the “wet” animal markets of Wuhan, China, and there is no doubt that we must enforce stringent laws to stop such hideously cruel and dangerous animal trade.
As always, conspiracy theories abound. Is it the “evil” Chinese cooking up bioweapons as a political ploy for world dominance – or is it the greedy power-hungry Americans? While there is no doubt that the ruthless tyrants of business and politics will find a way to use the situation to their advantage as they always do, these theories disregard one important fact. If the virus was a man-made pandemic, the outcome of such a disaster affects everyone globally. Just like the nuclear threat, it’s zero-sum. Then we have the theory that it’s the toxic electromagnetic frequencies emanating from the latest 5G technologies. It may well be possible that the effects on our health of this technology are extremely unhealthy and vastly under-rated. And perhaps it did contribute to the conditions that made us vulnerable to a viral pandemic, as did many others. Again, who knows? The bottom line is that there is one cause underpinning it, and that is ignorance.
Maybe all the above play a part because greed is the common denominator when it comes to so many of the systems that currently run this planet. However, while it is convenient to demonize and blame somebody else, what has now become abundantly clear or should be is that we are all in this together. The problem and the solution affect all of us and are up to all of us. And if we want to blame someone, then we need to blame ourselves. We must all accept responsibility for our own convenient blindness and acceptance of the tradeoff with unscrupulous greedy systems that afford us the kind of short-term affluent lives we are accustomed to living, at such long-term costs to all.
Just over 40 years ago the World Health Organization, along with scientists and medical researchers worldwide, thought they had abolished most infectious diseases, glibly making statements to the effect that the “age of infectious diseases is a thing of the past.” Of course we believed them because we wanted to believe. And then, suddenly, infectious diseases started making a comeback, even though most of us turned a blind eye.
Suddenly we had a ruthless killer in our midst, HIV, passed on to humans eating wild forest meat, mostly primates. Since its appearance in the ’80s, HIV has been declared a pandemic and has killed almost 40 million people worldwide. It is still killing people today. Ten years ago, swine flu was proclaimed a pandemic by the WHO, but it was not broadly publicized, because social media was in its infancy. But have we changed the way we farm pigs? No, we have not. In some countries, notably China and Spain, there are more pigs than people. In the last forty years, we have had several potential pandemics, mad cow disease, ebola, avian flu. Let us not forget that the last pandemic 100 years ago that wiped out up to 100 million globally was caused by avian flu.
More recently we have had two other serious viral outbreaks, SARS and MERS, both potentially deadly upper respiratory diseases of the same family as COVID-19, the now-infamous coronavirus. Apart from HIV, fortunately, relatively speaking, not many people died from any of the other outbreaks, because they were contained. Unfortunately, nobody paid enough heed to the underlying cause of all of them, which is that all were originally transmitted to us via animals.
Our Ruthless Extractive Domination of Nature
Neither Africa nor China and its awful exotic meat markets are the only culprits for viral pandemics. The cause may have many factors, but we cannot escape the fact that it is fundamentally linked to the way we relate to animals and the abuse of all our natural resources. Most notably how our farming practices not only contribute to climate change but affect animals and the systems they depend on to be healthy. We are animals too, in case anyone has forgotten.
Industrialized animal farming, also called confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), have proliferated globally. The treatment of animals is not only incredibly cruel, but it is also insanely dangerous to our health. Yet we have become over-dependent on thousands of CAFOs globally, and all are potential pandemics just waiting to happen. Most viruses are zoonotic, meaning they originate from animal hosts, unlike bacteria that survive happily with or without a host. Since we became agriculturists 10,000 years ago and farmed animals to eat as well as to help us farm, we have been paying the price of being their viral hosts. But animals farmed in healthy environments, treated with love, dignity and respect do not make us sick. We have sickened not only the animals but the planet we live on.
Affluenza Pandemics
About 100 years ago Rudolf Steiner said that feeding offal to cattle would cause them to go mad. Some decades later, voilà, mad cow disease! Animals are cruelly confined and sick because they are force-fed food that is not right for their programs. As a result, they require massive doses of antibiotics to keep them alive long enough for slaughter, which has resulted in the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria globally. If these bacteria are not enough to wipe us out, the next viral pandemic may well do so. What is missing from all the statistics screamed at us daily is that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are already a global pandemic killing untold thousands every year. Why are the media not shouting about this pandemic? And what about the thousands of people worldwide, mostly children, dying of starvation every single day? They don’t count, because they are mostly the poorest of the poor from Third World countries?
Even though the COVID-19 pandemic caught us all woefully unprepared, coming at a huge cost to us, we have been fairly lucky, so far. It may turn out not to have warranted the worldwide panic, lockdown and disastrous economic impact, but all the same, the COVID-19 virus is clearly no joke. It is a serious wake-up call to change our ways. If we manage to bring it under control – and we will eventually – it’s only a matter of time before the next one comes our way unless we make drastic changes. We cannot stay locked up indefinitely. This virus is not going to disappear suddenly, even if we do manage to find a vaccine, which is debatable. Many of us may already have or will develop immunity, and we will find the medication that helps us fight it. But the virus may just keep mutating, as the flu virus does every year, taking many thousands of lives globally.
Add that to the looming threat of climate change within which the pandemic is but a blip, and we may not be so fortunate next time. We all face big problems with our continued healthy existence on this planet, problems we can no longer ignore. Maybe we need to start listening to the scientists and the angry teenagers on this one. Our ignorance and petty self-indulgent lifestyles will not protect us any longer. The time has come for us to take off our blindfolds and change the way we live.
There are almost eight billion of us on the planet, and all of us need to make a living and eat. Feeding us is no easy feat. Yet if there ever was an opportunity for humanity to truly investigate predatory capitalism fuelling not only many of the technological systems in place but also the industrialization of animal and agricultural farming practices behind our food system, it is now. This does not mean that we should all give up on technology, throw away our cell phones or move off “the grid” to the country to grow our own food. But our technological and food systems must evolve more sustainable, transparent, eco-friendly, humane practices, which is totally possible if we take greed out of the picture and introduce common sense. And if we all agree that change must happen for the good of all.
When a storm subsides, it washes clean pollutants that have been obscuring the view. When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a life-threatening illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light. We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible just a few weeks or months ago before the status quo was quarantined. We can come out of this with a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production and our future.
In many ways, we have already set this in motion. Though it is mystifying why so little is known and reported about it, much is already happening worldwide to change the way we live and farm, which is extremely heartening. It’s not all gloom and doom, people! We must support any endeavour that promotes life instead of killing it by challenging big corporations, buying food and all products from environmentally responsible sources.
At issue regarding antibiotic-resistant bacteria or the virus is not the morality of eating animals or not. Eating animals is neither right nor wrong. There are vital nutrients in animals not found in other sources. We have eaten animals since our caveman days, and we need certain animal nutrients to survive. I am not saying we must stop eating them unless that is your moral prerogative. But it is the system we have in place to farm animals that feeds a monstrous and gratuitous desire for animal flesh. If we eat meat we should do so sparingly, with great reverence and gratitude. We should only eat animals farmed naturally, not just for their sake, but for our own.
Food is life. We need to bring respect for it back into our lives. There is no excuse for ignorance anymore. We should not support cheap food systems that allow us to eat far more than we need with no thought for the life involved. Animal flesh should be a condiment at best. It should be expensive and not a dietary staple present at every meal. If you cannot afford to eat humanely farmed organic animal products, make eating meat a treat. Supplement your protein needs with sustainably farmed fish or sardines and mackerel, fermented tofu, nuts, eggs, and properly pre-soaked and cooked legumes and pulses. Eat mostly fresh “real” food, such as organic fruit and vegetables. Grow your own wherever possible; you would be surprised how little space and time you need to do this. Even a few window boxes on your balcony will do the trick. It is time we all reconnected with the cycles of nature and the intelligence that supports us.
I am writing a book at the moment that covers all lifestyle issues as they relate to Self-knowledge. It includes a whole section dedicated to the body and nutrition. I do not advocate any particular eating modality, because there is no one diet that works for everyone. While there are certain laws in the field of nutrition that do apply to everyone, we must make the decision as to what works best for us both morally and physiologically.
The only diet proved to be extremely unhealthy for everyone is the Western diet, which gave rise to most of the diseases of civilization, arguably the greatest pandemics of all time – cancer, diabetes, heart conditions, high blood pressure, you name it. It is also behind the global pandemic of malnutrition and obesity as bad, if not worse, than any bacteria or virus, causing many thousands of preventable deaths every year. Again, why are we silent about this? Because we have become addicted to unhealthy food and are willing to pay the price to eat it, regardless of the cost to us or the planet that is our only home.
The Western diet relies on the flawed science of “nutritionism,” which holds that we can eat nutrients in isolation and combine them to create “food-like” substances, invariably liberally laced with chemicals. So we eat way more than we need, yet do not get sufficient nutrition, because the food we eat is deficient in it.
The Western diet is also behind the industrialization of animal products. It is high in all the things that make us sick: chemicals, sugar and transfats, which are chemically created pseudo-fats. It is low in things we need to be truly healthy, such as natural fats and whole nutrients found in nature. It ignores the fact that everything in the field is connected to everything else and the body needs food grown naturally in a harmonic symbiosis of co-factors and nutrients. There is no substitute for real food.
The Western diet developed out of the Industrial Age and the me-first, technological, political, economic and social mindset it spawned. My husband calls it the virus of “affluenza,” and it is more deadly than any other virus. It has grown to be a monster that is devouring us. Are we going to change? Are we prepared to continue to suffer for our unexamined likes and dislikes, destroying the planet in the process, creating the perfect breeding ground for pathogens that kill us? Time will tell, but ignorance is not sustainable. A few of us inquirers respect our bodies and the environment we live in. We live knowledge-based lives filled with gratitude for the complexity of factors that keep our bodies alive. What about the rest?
Other than truly organic, sustainable eco-friendly farming of plants and animals, there is virtually no food available to us now that does not pose a moral dilemma. Nobody is exempt. I believe there is only one overarching imperative regarding what we eat, which is that it is morally indefensible to support the industrialization of animals, whether for meat or dairy. It is also morally indefensible to support Big Agra, which is huge-scale industrialized monocrop farming. We do not escape culpability for being blind to what we eat and where it comes from just because we do not eat meat. Big Agra is behind large-scale destruction of wildlife habitat and the animals that live on it, chemical poisoning and genetic engineering, abuse of water sources, as much as industrialized animal farming.
Everyone has blood on their plates because life eats life. Nobody is morally or spiritually superior because they are vegan. In addition, the animal farmers as well as Big Agra both support Big Pharma in an unholy alliance. Because we are lazy and self-obsessed, we give these greedy corporations permission to make us sick, and then they sell us magic pills to make us “better”! It is a perfect crime, and we are complicit in it. This is not a time for self-righteousness or blame. It is a time for taking responsibility – the ability to respond appropriately. Are we going to respond in knowledge or ignorance? You should know, because at stake is your health and quite possibly your life and those you love most dearly.
It is time to stand up to these villains and to our greedy villainous, gratuitous desires. Let’s change our ways, let’s give back, taking care of our bodies, each other and our global home. We must speak out about these issues. Make your voice heard where it counts. It is everyone’s moral duty to do so because we all share this beautiful Earth that provides us with all that we need to live. And the message it is giving us right now is that it has had enough of our complacent extractive mindset. Will you listen? It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for ways to decide it. We all make a difference, there are no exceptions.
A climate campaigner had this to say: “We are witness today to daily displays of love that reminds us of the many reasons why humans have survived this long. We encounter epic acts of courage and citizenship each day in our neighbourhoods and in other cities and countries, instances that whisper to us that the depredations of a few will eventually be overcome by legions of stubborn people who refuse the counsel of despair, violence, indifference and arrogance that so-called leaders appear so eager nowadays to trigger.”
I say amen to that.
~ Much love, Sundari