Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.
Epictetus
The ever-worsening and expanding world crisis is teaching us something we don’t really want to acknowledge. We do not control anything: the education system, our families, ourselves, terror, commerce, economy or finance, viruses, insurgents, the weather, politics, or anything else in our lives. These are lessons of the comprehensive crisis, the systemic breakdown in which all systems are collapsing. We are reaching a state in which we are beginning to comprehend and to feel within us our helplessness.
We are busy reacting, blaming, enacting laws, creating vaccines, fighting what we call “wars” on drugs and against anything else that seems threatening. We value all of these efforts and multiply them, believing they will bring solutions. And still, the world is spiraling into a state of confusion and danger.
What is the cause of the global crisis we face?
Our broken relationships with each other on every level. Nature’s law of cause and consequence responds to the intentions behind our actions. When we act egoistically—caring only for ourselves and willing to harm others by fulfilling our every desire—we create imbalance in the integrality of Nature. And she simply won’t tolerate it. We are witness to how she is storming, burning, erupting and quaking in order to return to equilibrium.
The thing that humanity hasn’t yet understood is that we are part of the deterministic system of nature. Our bodies are made of elements that existed before us on the inanimate, vegetative and animal levels of nature. Thus, what we do affects the entire integral system. In turn, the systems readjustments affect us without regard to whether we live through them or not.
You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Marcus Aurelius
The power of thought has been well-documented by science—that what we think ripples out into the entire system and affects it either positively or negatively, depending on our care and love for or our neglect and hate toward others. Choice followed by consequence.
What we’re observing is that the more polarized we become, the more lessons nature gives us about how we need each other. The coronavirus has resulted in the loss of so much that we value of the material world, including the very livelihoods of many. Will we realize that Nature may be showing us the stark contrast between a consumer society and one where we routinely reach out to others? Receiving vs. giving. We are meant to receive the abundance of the earth, but only when we allow others to have their share and when we mutually care for each other.
What remains in diseases after the crisis is apt to produce relapses.
Hippocrates
The disease from which mankind suffers is egoism. We want what we want when we want it. It has become normalized that we seize what our heart desires even knowing that our greed and lust for wealth and power hurt others. There are vaccines on the horizon for the coronavirus, but it will continue to mutate, and the next pandemic will be even more deadly.
It’s an Inside Job
In the same way, if we are unable to fundamentally change our attitudes toward each other, the global crisis will worsen—a very worrisome fact in view of despotic world leaders and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We have no control over viruses, or politically oppressive regimes, or weather, or the stock market, or… ANYTHING.
That is, except our willingness to change ourselves. This means learning to adhere to the basic law of nature—to love and care for one another. Religions preach this, but we pay no heed. Religions themselves pay no heed.
The remedy for the demise of our societies is to take this law, this truth of Nature, inside ourselves, to believe it, and to act out of its presence in us. All of our actions need to be in collaboration and cooperation, coupled with intentions aimed at developing and enhancing the common good. It all begins with each one of us, individually, inside our hearts. If we are to stop the headlong race toward our own extinction, bold and radical action is required.
Nature is moving us toward a higher state and will not relent until we reach it. The question is whether Nature has to kill most of us in order to get there, or if we will see the truth of the transition in which we find ourselves and outrace Nature to the fulfillment of her goal. It is first and foremost an individual choice, and eventually every person on the earth will have to make the correct one. Why not now?