The Many Spiritual Issues of a Pandemic

All belief systems are explanatory models.  We use explanatory models to make sense of the world; some models are complex, like quantum mechanics, and others are overly simplistic, like racism.  Regardless, each and every belief is an explanatory model.  Models overlap in the real world; three people sitting side-by-side in an airplane could easily include an atheist, a Christian, and Flat-Earther.

This article will explore the ways spirituality, not religion, attempts to address the issues raised by a global event like the COVID19 pandemic.  Many of the issues and concerns emerging and expanding during the pandemic will affect us on practical, psychological, and spiritual levels. 

A Spiritual Explanation

Consider for a moment that the planet is an organism, not just a host for organisms.  The Gaia principle/hypothesis/theory purports the idea that living organisms and the environment communicate with one another as a type of complex intelligence.  Two scientists, chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis formulated the idea in the 1970s.

From a spiritual point of view, this possibility of a form of intelligence would suggest that the entire planet could react if threatened on a large enough scale to warrant a release of an anti-body.  In a quirk of thinking, the virus is not the virus, but instead the anti-body, making humans the virus.

The idea that humans act like a virus, rather than a symbiotic or co-dependent organism to the earth, gains traction if one organism interacting with another organism (the host) begins to threaten the health and well-being of the host.  If conscious life is a spiritual test, the conscious life would be “failing” if its action put the host, the earth, in jeopardy.

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Spiritual Beings Having Human Experiences, Not the Other Way Around

As more work and study and stories emerge around reincarnation, we have yet another explanatory model that makes for interesting hypotheses.  If we take the approach that human existence is not only finite in terms of a life lived, but also in terms of gaining spiritual awareness before dying, then we would be humans striving for spiritual experiences that would prepare us for eternal spiritual life.

That view can be all good and well if you happen to fall into a society with education, opportunities, civil stability, and development beyond survival and safety, the two bottom-most layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  If you cannot get to Love and Belonging, there is very little chance to develop spiritual awareness or even locate the road to enlightenment.

However, if you are a spiritual being, visiting and revisiting the planet, and maybe not just this planet, then you would have all the time in the world to experience and learn every aspect of human conscious existence.  With each successive lifetime, you could choose a short, violent peasant life, both as a male and a female, then choose the next one to be born into wealth.

If you embrace the reincarnation model, which is a choice model (rather than fate), then you would have to acknowledge that one of your spiritual issues would be choosing to be on the planet at the time of a pandemic.  What lesson or lessons could your soul possibly want to learn by being here now, as an act of learning?

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The Many Faces of Lessons

It is a reasonable thought to assume that each incarnation of your soul helps you gain spiritual awareness towards a complete understanding of all experience.  However, to get full and comprehensive knowledge, you would need to choose negative as well as positive experiences.  The spiritual issue of being part of a pandemic ranges based on circumstance as well as soul archetype.

For a person with an underlying medical condition or someone elderly, those at high risk, the lesson will involve the impact of severe illness or sudden death.  For the souls who chose to be children, the lesson will be very different.  If you are wealthy during the pandemic, you might encounter the lesson of losing that wealth rapidly or being shielded better than others because of wealth.

One family may come together and heal, while another may unravel and fall apart.  Either way, a pandemic puts everything about human life in stark relief; there are no soft edges.  Moving beyond particular issues in certain circumstances, a pandemic amplifies all human understanding and flaws, especially if a pandemic persists.  It is easy to forget a lesson if it does not get driven “all the way home”, and across the entire spectrum of human life.

If the current pandemic persists for the entire remainder of the year, and into next year, even the most insulated will not be untouched.  Granted the impact could still be secondary rather than direct, but the secondary degree of impact will increase with the length of time the virus persists and stays active with a high rate of severe illness.  A comparison with the flu is only viable if you compare the current outbreak with the start of the Spanish flu, not current flu statistics.

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Learning Your Lesson to Lessen the Negative Impact of a Pandemic on Your Life

The most powerful negative impact of a pandemic outside physical suffering is despair and mental anguish.  Being spiritual is a pathway to mental and emotional health in times of crisis, especially if your spiritual model resists the idea that a pandemic is punishment and instead see it as an opportunity, especially to correct negative behavior that can make a pandemic so much worse.

Einstein is famous for saying that you cannot fix a problem with the thinking that created the problem.  A pandemic is a pressure test, applied worldwide, that will show how each explanatory model responds when forced to face the same crisis in an objective way.  Even if the virus is the planet’s antibody, it is also possible that the planet wants a symbiotic relationship with spiritual energy through human matter.

If so, this will be a corrective period, one in which some models will prove woefully inadequate and fail if the experiment of spiritual beings wanting to learn from incarnated experiences is going to continue.  The larger lesson is about balance and how far out of balance a system can go before a corrective measure begins to emerge and start working.  The degree and intensity of the re-balancing action will be proportionate to the quality and range of the out-of-balance reality.  We will feel the impact on every level of human life.