That our world is out of balance has been known for a long time, but up until the emergence of the Corona crisis many of us could still afford to be in denial.
Now everyone – and each country all over the world – is confronted with the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic.
We count the numbers of new infections and death toll daily and suddenly we realize that our seemingly well-ordered and predictable world has collapsed and as one politician named it: Now it’s a question about life and death. “To Be or not to Be, that is here the question” is a citation from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”. What is the meaning of being alive or death?
I remember some words John F. Kennedy said: “When written in Chinese, the word CRISIS is composed of two characters: One represents DANGER and the other represents Opportunity.
Later a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania corrected Kennedy’s words in so far as the word “crisis” does not mean in Chinese both “danger” and “opportunity”
However, more research about the Chinese word for “crisis” affirms that the first character of the word conveys the emotion of “danger”, a dangerous, critical moment, whereas the second character means a crucial point (when something begins or changes). Therefore, we could say that the word CRISIS does not mean a favorable opportunity, but indeed a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry.
But when you think of being in the centre of a cyclone, there comes a critical point where things can happen, a turning point… and this seems also contained in the Chinese word for “crisis”.
I was reminded of a book I read long time ago by John C. Lilly “The Centre of the Cyclone”. He spoke in this book of a transformation of consciousness. How to reach a new level of consciousness, beyond the ego consciousness: Cosmic Consciousness. After his death his work has fallen into a collective amnesia. And most of us have been going on with life as usual, living in our unconscious ways, a well as our illusions.
Now we are living in the time of Corona and it seems as if the catastrophe is running havoc. It serves us well to remember that the ancient Greek word “catastrophe” means “turning point”. What we have reached at this time is a point of necessary transformation in the evolution of our species.
C.G. Jung wrote: “Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered”:
Here we are confronted with the Corona virus, as a modern-day plague of Egypt. What is its message? What is it revealing to us? “To be or not to be?”, our very survival depends upon decoding its message.