Sunday, March 28, 2021
5:20 a.m. I suppose I ought to ask if you guys have something you’d like to say this morning. You will have overheard my email back-and-forth with Dirk over the virus and vaccines. I wonder what your two cents’ worth may be.
Summarize the positions, briefly.
I wondered: Given that the virus seems to be mutating into more lethal forms as it meets with vaccines designed to kill it, might it not be better not to address it via an attempt to kill it, but to live with it and, hopefully, to out-live it.
Dirk’s argument, as I understand it, is that the proper thing to do would have been to strangle it in its cradle, as China, New Zealand and Australia apparently did, rather than let it survive and mutate. But given that we have not done that, the only answer is to aggressively contain, vaccinate, deal with each new strain as it emerges, and hope to eradicate it before it moves into some animal population which would make it forever ineradicable. He sees a failure to do this as an irretrievable disaster, and I think he has severe doubts that we will succeed.
So then pose your question.
Who is closer to being right, I suppose. Is it better to let it ride as is, hoping it doesn’t continue to mutate by not overdosing people – no, that’s clumsy. Let me try again.
With antibiotics, overuse and use at low dosages led to the accidental but predictable breeding of more resistant strains. Is that what we’re in the process of doing now with the virus, and if so are we better advised to cease inoculating (which, I recognize, is not going to happen, but would we have been better off by not doing it) or is the inoculation campaign a good idea, and in either case is it likely to succeed.
Given the phrasing of the question, we hope you won’t mind if we answer a somewhat different and more fundamental question.
Wouldn’t be the first time. Proceed, by all means.
The question of how to manage and survive the virus is less fundamental than the question of where did it come from, why (as well as how) is it manifesting, and what can individuals do about it. This is a more fundamental question, or set of questions, because it is difficult to deal effectively when you don’t understand what you are dealing with.
Okay. Thoreau again, about hacking at the branches or hacking at the root of the problem.
Yes.
First, remember this, and if you overlook it, or forget it, or disbelieve it, we have nothing to say to you that can help you: The world is not a mess of conflicting disconnected forces, no matter how it appears to be. No one dies or lives, gets well or gets sick, thrives or withers, by chance, by accident, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one meets an untimely death, nor has its life blighted for no reason, nor suffers without full recompense. You know this when you are considering life in other aspects, while you are in other moods, so to speak. Remember it when times get tough.
Yes. I used to say admiringly of Bob Friedman that he was the only person I knew whose metaphysics did not depend upon the state of his bank account.
Same principle, yes. If a thing is not true in “bad times,” it was never true in “good times.” Similarly, if it is not true in big things, it is not true in little things.
But if this life-changing, civilization-changing virus is not an accident to be overcome, what is it? A judgment from God, as televangelists somewhat arrogantly and ignorantly insist? The unavoidable consequence of your civilization?
I lean toward the latter, but I am not entirely convinced, because if we needed chastisement and course-correction – as clearly we do! – it didn’t have to come in this form .
We would argue that if you needed chastisement and course-correction, you who live within the situation would not be in a position to know what was required, nor what were the choices.
All right, I can see that. And I do remember that you said, long ago, that natural energies express either as human action or as natural disaster; war or earthquake, in effect.
And that was before we were able to convey the concept that everything is alive and conscious, and that the “external” world is a shared subjectivity, thus inextricably part of you as you are part of it. Perhaps you can see more easily now, how the same tensions might erupt via people or via the world.
Indeed I can. It’s a little bit surprising that I could accept the concept before realizing the rest of it.
Well, which is the virus? A natural event or a human one?
It can’t be answered that way.
No, it can’t. That’s our point. Now another question: Where did the energies originate that express as this civilization-transforming event?
I suppose it can only have been in our civilization itself. Is it relevant that it appeared during the years that Trump made manifest the shadow side of so many things?
If you will bear in mind that these years were the baring of the shadow side of all ideologies and unknown belief systems operative, yes. If you think it exposed the hypocrisies and failures and underlying bad faith of only left or only right (or only center, for that matter), then no.
Well, that’s my belief, as you know. But in any case those years did serve to show what we are rather than what we like to think ourselves. Left, right, center have all proven to be inadequate, and each in its lack of breadth has spurred and fueled the others. It’s natural. That’s why a period of governance by any side results in a growth of emotional resistance from the other. It must be that way, even when you get an administration (to confine it to government for the moment) that attempts to be inclusive. How can any position include its opposite?
So, look at your situation. Regardless what you think you believe in, you rely upon armies and police to suppress perceived threats. You allow theory to justify rampant inequity (we don’t say inequality here, but inequity) among races, classes, and all manner of distinctions that might be drawn. You destroy the physical matrix that supports you. And within these blanket statements, uncounted specifics could be adduced.
Then comes a condition so out-of-control, so widespread, so potentially lethal, that nothing your society is accustomed to do can protect it from. What good is an army against a virus? How can police put it down? How does anything constructed of the profit-motive address it? How can its effects be limited to protect this or that specific segment of society?
We return to our starting-point: Nothing happens by accident. It is not a judgment from God. It is not an unavoidable result of your civilization. So then, what is it?
You did not specifically rule out something man-made, but I am assuming you would.
We leave that out not by inadvertence but in order not to derange the exposition by a statement that some would argue against and would thereby cease lose their ability to listen.
Interesting. Okay, so –?
So, as we say, if not those things, what is it? And one answer might be (that is, one way to look at it might be) that it is an unsummoned opportunity. Like your social developments that clarified people’s values without in any way reconciling opposites, this brings to the fore your assumptions about the world and proves them out, one way or the other. If you live in faith, if you live in caution, if you live in fear – here’s your opportunity to see it as you live it.
Kind of a drastic exposition of belief, isn’t it?
Do you think so? How many people were living lives that allowed them (much less compelled them) to give thought to such subjects?
So we deal with it – how?
Stay tuned. This is enough for one session.
An hour almost to the minute. Okay, thanks for this and for 30 years of such information. Till next time.