Learning From Corona: What Is Possible Through Fear Must Also Be Possible Through Trust
Leila Dregger, 16 March 2020
Thanks to the coronavirus, we as humanity are currently learning something very precious. We’re learning how powerful and efficient something incredibly tiny can be when it resonates with a latent field. This tiny thing, in this case, is a virus. The latent field is fear – an immense, collective fear of the future: an ingredient and counterpart of turbo-capitalism on the edge of global collapse.
Things are happening today that no one else has been able to achieve, not the climate strikes or environmental actions of recent years, nor the UN in all its years of existence, nor all the efforts, threats, appeals, movements and scientists, nor the Pope or other authorities. Now we’re seeing determined, rigorous action across all continents. Industry, tourism, education, sports… Large areas of public life in many countries of the world have been locked down. Humanity is on pause. And suddenly, the skies over China and northern Italy are clearing up again – air pollution is decreasing dramatically – people stay at home and finally have time for themselves, to reflect and contemplate, think about what is essential, be with their children and the people close to them. In Italy, they’re singing to each other from windows and balconies.
Who or what could cause this? Who has so much power? We’ve heard conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, but we deliberately don’t deal with them here. If the new coronavirus was actually passed to humans from wildlife, we could see it as a measure of nature to help humanity to finally change our lives.
Regardless of whether the virus is man-made or natural, it shows us how fragile and vulnerable our globalized systems are and that humanity is capable of fundamentally changing its collective behavior, literally from one day to the next. Let’s take the forced pause mode to imagine how a healing transformation in our societies could come about! How will we supply ourselves – who are the ones around us that we can cooperate with – what will we do when the global systems actually collapse?
Perhaps later we will look back on the corona crisis as a great collective exercise in which we began to develop the decentralized community systems with which we could respond to the ecological and social crises. Fear and panic aren’t good advisors. The qualities we need most at this time of radical change are trust, mutual support, responsibility for the whole, flexibility and openness in the face of the unpredictable.
Something remains startling: the incredible power of the virus and its ability to show humanity that we’re much more intimately connected than we thought. When a substance in our airways, which is only transmitted through direct contact, spreads around the world within a few weeks, we can say: We are indeed one breath.
And that is good news. Why shouldn’t we also be able to use this intimate unity of life on Earth to start a positive movement? What is possible through fear must also be possible through trust. From mouth to mouth, something quite different than a virus could then be shared.
Above all, there is a message of hope and certainty for the future: that we’re part of a large community of people, animals, nature and divine beings who form a unified whole, who support, help, perceive, complement and love each other. The Earth and humanity can be healed, even at this stage, and in a short time, if we humans realize and accept our real task. Love and unity are the basic substance in the alliance of all living beings – that is the good news.
What do we need to make this good news spread just as quickly as the virus does now?
We need to resonate with another collective field within us, one that is much deeper than fear – a field that is still hidden at the moment. It’s the collective field of trust, the matrix of life, which Dieter Duhm refers to as the “sacred matrix.” For, despite all the suffering, all the horrors of the past and all the threats, life is still oriented towards joy, curiosity and survival. There is a core within us that knows this. This core is called trust. And as absurd as it may seem to many in the face of all the precautions and restrictions, this is our common task now – to strengthen the field of trust through everything we do, think, communicate and how we interact with each other. This is also our work in developing Healing Biotopes: working together to shake off the trauma of fear and activate the deeper layer of trust. This will be the foundation of a new culture.