Heartfulness in the time of a pandemic
A little bit more than a year ago I left a comfortable and well-paying corporate job in Amsterdam and moved to the south of Spain. My idea was to reflect on life, understand myself, and find my true calling. I gave myself a sabbatical year, hoping that by the end of the year I would have figured out the answers to many of my questions. Although this move carried considerable financial risk, I felt supported by the woman I considered the love of my life. I was taking a leap of faith, for sure, but at least we were leaping together. It turned out, however, that my faith in the relationship was misplaced. It seems that we came together only to catalyze the move, but not to continue the journey hereafter. I found myself suddenly alone in a country where I don’t speak the language, know no one and have no job. A situation that I have never experienced before in my life. I am not going to deny that there was a moment in which I panicked and doubted the sanity of the decision I made. There were two things that I had to do quickly. First, I needed to evaluate whether the purpose for which I moved here was still valid. Second, I needed to create a social network to not feel alone and isolated.
After reflection, I concluded that the purpose was still valid; I moved because I was fed up with living a rational life that does not nourish my heart. That had not changed. So, regardless of the circumstances, I decided to stay committed to my current course. That decision paid back handsomely when I was able to, finally, find the content of my heart and learn to hear and trust its voice. Living with the guidance of your heart is what I call “heartfulness”. It is a way of life that is in contrast to the rational way of living. Instead of feeling like an island isolated from everything and everyone, heartfulness taught me that I am part of a whole. What I call myself, others and the world is a gestalt. My consciousness is only focused on one fragment of that totality that I identify with as myself. Reaching this point of understanding and living by it has changed my life. It has, definitely, helped me cope with the bizarre circumstances we all found ourselves trapped in as the coronavirus spreads from one country to the next.
Spain declared emergency measures to contain the spread of the virus. There is a total lockdown, severe restriction on movement, and a ban on gatherings. This happened just as I began to enjoy a normal and balanced social life again. Almost overnight, I was not the only one panicking over social isolation. Effectively, my solo living started to feel like solitary confinement. However, there was a major difference this time; I was able to see what is going on from my heart’s point of view. What my heart sees is that far worse and wider than the spread of the coronavirus, was the spread of fear. The virus has infected an estimated 330,000 cases worldwide (at the time of writing), while fear has gotten into, at least, 6.5 billion out of the 7.7 billion living today. With fear came paranoia and hysteria that are oscillating to a fever pitch. Almost every news outlet and media channel is feeding this hysteria. Everywhere you look, more fear and gloom are injected into the spinning wheel of your mind. And we all know what this wheel can spin. Left unchecked in a vicious circle, it can easily lead to insanity. This is also what I felt talking to different people; their minds are spinning negative scenarios one after another. Anxiety and paranoia are building up fast, and being confined in the cubic space of one’s home is not helping.
I am lucky because I have the views of my heart supporting me in these strange times. I feel that the fear which has presented itself as such a ferocious monster is here to make us examine the life we are living. Fear is the most disempowering emotion in the universe. It subjects whoever feels it to the force and tyranny of whatever is feared, notwithstanding the real power of the person, object or idea that is feared. The mind can easily create a monster out of an invisible particle and transform a normal day into an apocalypse. Fear is so powerfully negative because it subtracts a lot from the energy available to you and gives it away to what you fear. You are, literally, breathing life into what you fear. Subsequently, that can subjugate you using your own energy. This is the simple arithmetic of disempowerment.
Disempowerment is so common in our lives that we hardly give it any attention. We easily buy into the statements of fear mongers without realizing how this affects our options in life. But the intensity of the fear we are facing this time will push many of us to examine our attitude towards it. Fear is merely an emotion that is, most of the time, generated by an imagined scenario. The billions of people who are afraid are not sick or dying, but they fear to be sick and dying. This is the mind spinning its wheels to control the individual. This will not happen if you are living with awareness and listening to the voice of your heart. My heart, for example, sees that this fear has two levels. Collectively, the fear which is gripping the world is a reflection of the fear humanity has been harboring inside each one of us. It is a byproduct of the rational view of life which sees us as isolated from the totality of it; that we are only here to exploit or being exploited. This is the time to step back from that view which we have been feeding for millennia. It is time to rethink our relationship to each other, to our environment, and also to our institutions. We have always been operating under the banner of “survival of the fittest”, focusing on our needs at the expense of others’. This is the mentality that breeds fear. The same fear, which by the virtue of us feeding it our energy, is now paralyzing the world.
Individually, we all have our unique fears to face. But the most obvious of these fears is the fear of death. The current crisis is giving us a unique opportunity to reflect on our relationship with life and death. Rational thinking which dictates that we are separate from others has also been telling us that we are more important than others. We feel that our lives are more important than the lives of others, especially of those who are different from us. We feel that as long as we are well fed and protected, it does not matter if others are fed and protected or not. In the grand scheme of things, the coronavirus has not killed as many as poverty and hunger do every single day. All over the world, billions were allocated to combat the spread of the virus. But we never feel obliged to allocate similar funds to combat ailments of the poor and the disadvantaged. The wound of that separation and segregation is deep within the body of humanity. However, today we are all facing the same fate. A fate that does not distinguish between rich or poor, white or black, Muslim or Hindu. The virus is collecting us in one basket, urging us to rethink our way of life and giving us ample time to do so. My personal feeling is that the extent of the scar this virus is going to leave on the body of humanity depends on our individual and collective choices. If we start to spread love instead of fear, connect instead of isolate and collaborate instead of compete, we will soon emerge from this crisis into a brighter future. If we decided to stay anchored to our old materialistic and isolationist mentality, then I pray for humanity.