“What We Can Learn From The Coronavirus Pandemic” (Thrive Global)

Thrive Global published my new article: “What We Can Learn From the Coronavirus Pandemic”

If we continue relating to each other negatively, we will set conditions for more viruses and problems to surface.

Vendor Cedric McIver gives change back to a customer at the Farmers Public Market in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., March 21, 2020. Picture taken March 21, 2020. REUTERS/Nick Oxford

Unlike pandemics of the past, which affected localities and regions, the coronavirus pandemic is global. It affects everyone in the world.

Today, humanity shares a common concern as the virus has spread around the planet, taking no notice of any man-made national borders or social status classifications. Moreover, experts predict that the pandemic will last at least a year until we develop the means to combat it.

The pandemic has alerted us to face some serious questions:

· What needs to happen in order for us to exit the pandemic and return to our normal lives?

· Other than following government guidelines, what is required of us during this pandemic?

· Why do such overwhelming and confusing problems emerge in the first place?

· How can we solve this and the many other problems we face in our lives?

On one hand, the pandemic highlights the vastness of our global interconnectedness and interdependence. On the other hand, our connections are egoistic, where each person lives with an emphasis of self-benefit over the benefit of others.

While we live interdependently with each one tugging toward him- or herself on the single rope that ties us all together, then we end up in such situations when the connections between us tear apart and we all fall down. That is what we now experience with the mass social distancing that emerged as part of the pandemic’s chain of events.

The current pandemic has only just begun to expose the grimness of the competitive-egoistic paradigm we lived according to. Now, while we are physically remote from each other, the wisest use of our time would be to work out how an optimal form of human connection would appear.

We will have to reach harmonious and balanced connections with each other as it is the only way to experience harmony and balance with nature.

Michael Laitman

Also, while depicting perfect connection among people to ourselves, we should think about how we can create positive and unified connections that no virus would be able to break through.

In other words, the coronavirus is nature’s way of telling us that our connection with each other is flawed: that we each prioritize self-benefit over benefiting others.

How, then, can we start repairing this flaw?

We can do so by starting to learn about the laws of nature, about how nature is a quality of love and bestowal that guides everyone toward increasingly unified states, how all of our problems stem from our imbalance with nature, how balance with nature will solve all of our problems, and also that balance with nature means caring about others no less than we care about ourselves.

Since the coronavirus is humanity’s common problem, showing us how we are all parts of a single globally interdependent system, it thus demands that humanity wake up to the need for mutual consideration and responsibility.

Therefore, in order to encourage more closeness and balance with nature, humanity would do well to at least extract the following two takeaways during the course of this pandemic:

1) The coronavirus pandemic is no coincidence. It is a part of a process through which nature guides humanity, and it thus strives to positively connect us all into a single system.

2) In this system, there are laws that nature will obligate us to accept, either willingly — through our own initiative to positively connect above our egoistic drives — or unwillingly — through problems and crises such as the coronavirus that surface in order to rattle our ego-based infrastructures, so that we start contemplating and revising the way our lives are headed, until we seek a different direction, the focus on benefiting others over benefiting ourselves.

Nature is leading us to a positive and complete form of connection. One way or another, either with our agreement to positively connect and experience its process enjoyably, or with our disagreement to positively connect and endure its blows, there is no way out of this process.

We will have to reach harmonious and balanced connections with each other as it is the only way to experience harmony and balance with nature.

If we continue relating to each other negatively, we will set conditions for more viruses and problems to surface. That is, all problems appear in places of our neglected chances to establish positive connections upon our negative ones.

Therefore, I hope that we will use this period of social distancing we have been placed in for introspection, and learn how we can ultimately become more connected and similar to nature’s perfectly connected form.
[262167]
Published on March 25, 2020