The Third Aspect of Fear: The Loss of Heart
As I was writing the introduction to this article, I decided to find out when playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. As I scanned through the Google search results on my monitor to locate the information, I noticed two items that took me aback due to their stunning relevance to this pandemic.
The first item was two lines from an online learning site called Study.com. The following question is posed to students: What was Arthur Miller’s message in The Crucible? And the answer? Miller’s message is that public hysteria based on fear destroys people’s lives.
The second item stated that The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials that took place in the late 1600s. This probably isn’t news to many readers, but it was definitely big news to me! As it happens, “Miller wrote the play [in the 1950s] as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists. Miller was questioned by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.” (quote from Wikipedia)
Since much of the world is in a heightened state of fear because of the coronavirus pandemic, it would behoove us to review the painful lessons that we in the US learned and hopefully have not forgotten from events like the Salem witch trials and like McCarthyism. It appears that the great scourge of “the other” has, once again, come calling at humanity’s door. Always, it seems, such an easy card to play. This scourge is infamous for the number of guises it has worn throughout history. And no matter the guise, it has never failed to cause untold, long-lasting misery. When we finally decide to stop falling for this fear, perhaps our unwelcome visitor will stop paying us house calls.
Some might say, “Well, for heaven’s sake, you can’t compare fear of a virus to fear of witches and communists.” Well, is fear of a virus really so very different from fear of any of these other things? Are the far-reaching consequences really so very different? This is not just an exercise in an ethics class. This is a critically important thing to grasp as we all sit in isolation in our homes, and as certain legislators begin to encourage us point blank to snitch on one another.9,10 I, for one, am not yet convinced that fear of a virus is all that different from these other fears that ended up costing us so very dearly in the past.
The Fourth Aspect of Fear: Fear as a Personal and Collective Responsibility
A few weeks ago, I watched a rather poorly made but very compelling video on YouTube.11 It was about a Brazilian man’s quest for information about the novel coronavirus. Alberto Jose Varela took an entheogen, ayahuasca, to assist him on his quest to connect with the origin of the coronavirus. During the journey he discovered, to his surprise, that the roots of the virus were within himself, originating from his own unconscious fears. On his webpage about this experience he says that “Fear is the most lethal virus that we have developed as human beings. At some point we had to create something that would confront us to overcome it. We had to boost it and make it explode, otherwise we could neither assume it [sic] or resolve it.”12
Part of the reason that I found Varela’s self-styled investigation so interesting is that I had just done a similar investigation, but I used the method of dream incubation13 to receive information instead of using an entheogen. The question I asked arose from my current understanding that we are co-creators of our reality. So as I fell asleep that night my question was this: “How am I co-creating this coronavirus pandemic?” And I received a dream that night that surprised me. The dream was brief, and it showed me one of my fears – a fear that, up until that moment, had been entirely unconscious.
Fear is a powerful emotion, and therefore any fears we have—whether they are conscious or unconscious—will have powerful results in our lives and in the world around us. Is it possible that this virus is largely a result of our collective fears? If so, then what is the most responsible and effective thing that we can do to help dismantle this epidemic?
The Creation of Something New
According to our definition, a crucible is a trial that leads to the creation of something new.
From our current and most unusual locus in history we can look forward in time and see various probable futures. As Charles Eisenstein says in his magnificent piece entitled The Coronation, “a million forking paths lie before us.”14 Some of these probable futures make me feel desperately sad for humanity. And some of them make my heart sing like it has never sung before. Each probable future is the result of specific choices that we make in our now. It is advisable now more than ever before that we ask ourselves this question: “How do we want to live, and how do we want our children and grandchildren to live?” Do we passively accept what is being called “the new normal” because fear obscures our natural passion for life? Or do we set our imaginations free and wisely use some of our time to envision what we really want?
I like how Varela refers to his consciousness.11 He says it is his laboratory. And he understands that in this laboratory he can help create “a new virus, a virus of healing,” instead of a virus spawned by fear. He reminds us that if we can create the disease, then we are also perfectly capable of creating the cure. We all have our very own priceless laboratory, and collectively that amounts to a phenomenal amount of creative power.
If we navigate through this crucible with awareness and clear intent, we can come out the other side having created the kind of life on our beautiful planet Earth that reflects our hearts’ deepest desires.
References
- Resnick B. Scientists warn we may need to live with social distancing for a year or more. Vox. March 17, 2020.
- Dolan C. DOD study raises tantalizing question: does flu shot increase vulnerability to coronaviruses? Justthenews.com. May 14, 2020.
- The Truth Behind the COVID-19 Curtain Backed by Science and Biology 101. YouTube.com May 17, 2020.
- http://www.deitycentral.com/the-importance-of-dreams
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modKe1XeFLA
- https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/
- https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/us-gov-health-statistics-agency-directs-hospitals-confirm-suspected-covid-19-deat1
- https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media-infographic/
- https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/la-mayor-pushes-residents-to-rat-out-those-who-violate-stay-at-home-order-snitches-get-rewards/
- https://wkow.com/2020/03/19/heres-how-to-report-gatherings-of-10-or-more-people-to-authorities/
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-XVouWcS6mtBcBXwRZaDIQ
- https://www.albertojosevarela.com/en/the-creator-of-the-coronavirus-speaks-i-take-responsibility-for-having-created-it/
- https://dreamstudies.org/2009/08/31/how-to-incubate-a-dream/
- https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=3
