“How Will The World Be Different When COVID 19 Is Cured?” (Quora)

Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How will the world be different when covid 19 is cured?“

The coronavirus’ stubborn spread is changing the face of the planet, trampling our routines, and weaving a new picture from depths that we have yet to fully realize.

We still have our pre-coronavirus lifestyle in the back of our minds—that we will wake up in the morning, get dressed, taste our usual morning beverage, and take those same steps through our familiar urban terrain, our recognizable world of malls, stores, cafés, and restaurants.

However, we have begun to realize that perhaps we exaggerated the importance of materialistic consumption in our pre-coronavirus lives.

Now that we’ve been “sentenced” to life’s essentials, we start questioning the necessity of the excesses we were engaged in:

• Will our lives return to the “normal” that we knew before the coronavirus, or will they assume a new form?
• Will the close of the coronavirus era open a Pandora’s Box of long-awaited shopping and travel that we thirsted for during this period, or will we find ourselves freed from old burdens and welcome a new beginning?

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

We now have time to take a deep breath in, and ponder these questions.

One way or another, we will have to get used to sitting in our homes, perhaps even working from home, and settling for little.

Also, maybe we will come out of this period with an upgrade in our attitudes to each other. For instance, maybe we would take away from the coronavirus, that as it doesn’t discriminate between people of different status, so we should also make no such discriminations.

However, coming to terms with the implications for our lives and the many mental and emotional changes will require time.

On one hand, we have a chance to decide whether the way we were living our lives should be revised in order to be better balanced with nature, while on the other hand, even if we reach such a decision, the way to do so is unclear.

At this juncture, we can make optimal use of this unique period by learning the principles of the interconnected and interdependent world we live in.

We would be wise to use this time to sharpen our awareness that we live in a single system, an integral universe, where we humans are intertwined with the inanimate, vegetative and animate life that surrounds us.

While we are interdependent parts of nature, our own nature—human nature—is self-centered, wanting to enjoy individually at the expense of anyone and anything it can get its hands on.

While we each try to serve our self-interests in an interdependent system, we look like we each pull on the same rope that connects between us all in a game of tug-of-war, and by doing so, we all end up eventually tumbling down.

Interdependence closes us in from the outside, and our self-centeredness presses up against the interdependence from the inside, and thus crisis erupts in between them.

The crisis we now experience is not due to the coronavirus but to our imbalance with nature, our lack of positive connection with each other.

In our connections with others, our egoistic nature constantly tries to serve its personal benefit over benefiting others. In order to reach balance with nature, overcome the coronavirus, and protect ourselves from future pandemics and other crises, we need to learn how to develop positive connections above our innate egos that constantly try to receive everything desirable for self-benefit alone.

Today, while we are isolated from each other under the social distancing and stay-at-home constraints, we have an opportunity to learn the principles of what it means to live in an interconnected and interdependent world.

We should thus be concerned about how to use this period in order to realize positive, considerate and healthy relationships, and how to develop an atmosphere that inspires us to give to others, benefit them, and think about them more than we consider ourselves.

Although it might seem frightening to take hold of the other end of the stick and think about others more than about ourselves, if mutual consideration and responsibility was a leading value in our society, then we would all receive a whole new sense of security, confidence and happiness likes of which we have never experienced before.

Nature is encouraging us to rise in our awareness and become integral like it is. We need only change our egoistic relations to altruistic ones, shifting our modus operandi from one of self-concern to one of concern for others.

We would then not only exit the coronavirus, but would enter a new world free from the problems of this life. We would be enveloped by a new supportive and protective force—nature’s own quality of connection, bestowal and love—and would be guided by this quality to build a perfect world.