This is very interesting. I felt completely overwhelmed during the eclipse, crying and exhausted, but my take on it was different. As an empathic and sensitive person, I felt that perhaps my reaction was not so much to the eclipse itself, but to the fact that huge amounts of people were focusing on the same thing at once, feeling excitement about it. Hundreds of thousands of people, or more, turned their attention to the same event within a very condensed period, they reacted to it, shifting their energies. The eclipse was a striking natural phenomenon that altered something very important that affects us in a very primal way: our access to the energy of the sun. Simultaneously, of course, it affected plants and animals, shifting their energies. So, it makes sense that we reacted to it strongly, but because humans' perceptions and how we process them are different from other creatures, I think our cognizance of the event generates stronger, more lasting emotions. (Honestly, my cats were super blasé about the whole thing, in comparison, haha.) For me, encountering high emotion from one or two people can feel like a lot... a whole crowd of people with feelings surging at once is powerful.
I do think that simultaneous experiences of high emotion can cause changes in people and therefore the course of events. I do hope it prompts change toward good things to happen. At the very least, it was wonderful having more attention turned to such a cool phenomenon, rather than the negative grind of fearmongering and discriminatory politics that has been casting a pall over the U.S. throughout the past year!
