Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is the world going to change forever because of the coronavirus?“
The coronavirus is inviting us to make a significant change.
It is up to us, however, whether we will experience the impending change as positive or negative.
What is the major change that the coronavirus comes to spark in us?
It is that we change our attitudes to each other, to think positively about each other in order to build a new society that is better connected and balanced with nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence.
If we saw nature’s tendency to develop us to become increasingly connected, with ties of mutual responsibility and consideration, then we would see that we need only implement more care and consideration for each other in order to positively realize our transition.
Failing to take any initiative to improve our connections would generate more suffering. That is, if we fail to upgrade our attitudes to each other, then we will feel the growing distance between the level of dependence nature requires of us and what we ourselves implement as various pains and complications. Vaccines and other medicines would then be of no use, as the coronavirus operates on a whole new level that we have yet to recognize.
It likely seems far-fetched that the coronavirus requires a change in our attitudes to each other more than anything else, and that we will fail to defeat it with mere physical means, but longer term effects of the coronavirus will urge our discovery of upgraded attitudes to each other out of a lack of other options.
In other words, through the coronavirus, nature has given us new conditions by which we undergo fateful changes. For example, if we want to teach our children a new language, mere explanations of that new language are insufficient in order for them to absorb it. But if we place them in conditions where they encounter the language more and more, such as posting words on post-it notes on various furniture and devices around the home, as well as holding regular times when we speak the new language together, then the practical change of conditions teaches the new language more than any explanations.
Therefore, through the new tighter interdependent conditions that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed to us, we would be wise to try and develop our attitudes, to match our new interdependence accordingly.
One exercise we can conduct in this direction involves masks. As health departments around the world have requested wearing masks in public places, we can check our attitude to such a condition: Do we wear the masks, or ignore the guideline? And if we wear the masks, is it because we don’t want to get infected by others, or is it because we don’t want to infect others in case we are asymptomatic carriers of the virus?
The latter discernment is definitely the most altruistic and closest to nature’s attitude to us.
That is just one exercise where we can check our attitude to others, and seek how to upgrade our attitude to such a level where benefiting others becomes as important, if not more important, than serving our narrow self-interests.
Above photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash
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