My Covid Silver Lining

Syaibatulhamdi at Pixabay

So, today is day ten, and I’m feeling much better. I’ve never experienced a sore throat like I did last week. Ever. The scope of my life experience narrowed to my own head and neck for several days. Everything else came to a screeching halt.

On the plus side, I’ve had the opportunity to contemplate the nature of struggle, in this case the effort to avoid something as natural and commonplace as swallowing. I know a little bit more now about why some people pray, and why some will try almost anything to deal with pain.

I feel more compassion now for all those who suffer… which is all of us, according to the Buddhists.

Over the past several decades, I have come to believe that the lessons of this human life of ours are purposeful and that purpose is for us to learn to be deliberate creators of our own experience. I have urged others to consider that idea as the context for their struggles. From the perspective of that belief, my heart goes out to all of us for the courageous choice to come here for the experience of being human.

However, I have begun to understand that in urging others to remember who they really are, whole and complete beings who come forth for experience, I have been neglecting our shared humanity. In sharing my suffering with others, I realized that I want to know that I am heard, wherever I happen to be in my process of awakening. Each of us is simply where we are on that journey, and we want only to feel our shared humanity. We need to know that we are not alone.

During my experience with the virus, I came to see how I expend a lot of time and energy judging other people, and myself, for almost everything about this pandemic encounter with the virus. I’ve made people wrong for wearing masks (such as alone in their cars) and for not wearing them (such as at large sporting and other events). I’ve judged people for isolating (outside, with masks) and for not isolating (“look at all those people standing together at that party"!”). I was judging others for conducting themselves in such a way as to come in contact with the virus. And now, the joke is on me.

Of course, I also recognize that this impulse of mine to judge isn’t confined to masks, our struggles with isolating versus gathering, or anything else for that matter. It’s the “water I swim in.” It shows me once again how pervasive and insidious this arguably most profound of all our culture’s illusions really is: our tenacious belief in separation.

We don’t think about or ponder our belief that we are separate entities. This belief places us in inevitable competition with each other and makes us feel obligated to judge others and ourselves. We think “from” that premise as if it is part of an ultimate reality, whatever that might be.

We are certain that we know who and what we are, even though science has, I believe, shown us otherwise.

We believe that the world is made of things, whether they be fundamental particles, objects, or people. And yet physics has shown us for over a century that this is an illusion. The world is not made of things, and we are not things either. Both we and the world are much more subtle and much more abstract, and finally ultimately unknowable in any direct sense. We make pictures in our minds as we interpret what our senses tell us, and those pictures become more refined as we go along. But we never see the world as it really is.

Separateness requires objects. If we are not objects or entities, then what is it that is, or could be, separate?

Separateness is an illusion. It is a conceptual construction created in our minds as we compartmentalize the world so that we can attempt to understand it. Without separateness, judgement and competition fade away as relics of a previous interpretation. Perhaps that will turn out to be the ultimate point of the virus, if indeed there is one.

For many of us, an unexpected silver lining of the virus will have been to bring to the surface of our consciousness that we are all in this together. It is not a better understanding, but rather the experience of our shared humanity, that eases the burden of our suffering. As a little-known philosopher once said, “Understanding is the booby prize.”