Due to commenting frequently on the coronavirus outbreak as nature’s response to the egoistic and exploitative way we as a human society had been relating to each other leading up to the pandemic, I was asked by one of my students:
How could a virus on a biological level come about as a result of people becoming increasingly egoistic and exploitative? It is clear, for instance, if one country wants to retaliate against another country that was exploiting it, but how are nature and viruses related to negative person-to-person attitudes?
To the naked human eye, it indeed seems as if the biological level and the level of human relationships are separate.
Everything in nature began from a single particle. That particle started connecting with another one, and then another one, and so on and so forth. At some point, this process generated atoms, and with further such development, molecules came about.
Life emerged when energy and information became transmitted between the various particles. This process then further developed into more and more complex forms of life.
In other words, everything in nature has been created such that even its tiniest parts are intrinsically connected with the whole universe.
Within this completely integral system, the human is the most complex and qualitatively highest level of all, and human thoughts, attitudes and relationships hold the most powerful influence over nature’s other levels.
Due to the capacity of human thoughts to impact other levels of nature, there is a Kabbalistic saying that states, “Everything is clarified in thought.”
I understand that we are unable to notice the extent of our thoughts’, attitudes’ and relationships’ influence on nature, and thus when a seemingly negative phenomenon strikes us, such as the coronavirus we now endure, we look like children who point at a broken glass that they accidentally hit while playing around, saying that it fell by itself.
However, the way that the coronavirus has forced us all into a common global situation, with many millions of people under stay-at-home orders, should serve to wake us up to our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other as being what ultimately connects us into a single network.
Moreover, we would be wise to reach the conclusion that our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other are the most important network that determines how nature responds to us.
If we create balance in such a network, we will then see how other levels of life become balanced. The gates to heaven on earth — a world of absolute perfection — will then open up before our very eyes.
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