Making Sense of a Pandemic and Awakening to Reality

19 min readMay 26, 2020

An Analysis of Various Illuminating Insights

Ramanathan S Manavasi aka M.R. Subramanian

COVID 19 Virus, Identity and Universality :

It’s unbelievable how much input we receive every day, and how many details we discard as unimportant. I wanted to have more control over that sorting process — to be able to tell my brain what I deem to be important information, and not simply be sucked into what the daily headlines or social media algorithms say I need to know right this minute. I wanted to learn how to look closely at something that others might find inconsequential. Here’s how it all started: Like many of us self quarantined at home during the Great Pandemic of 2020, I was ruminating with many thoughts to ponder. The pandemic COVID 19 virus prompted me to search for identity, universality and relationship responsibility. I had to hear news about the deaths of three relatives of mine, — natural death (not due to the virus) in a time span of two weeks. In the case of two persons, their sons could not even come from USA because of the restrictions due to COVID 19. I tried to understand the fear of death — or, I would say the almost neurotic avoidance of death and its implications. I have analyzed the insights from Brahadaranyaka Upanishad as well as statements of Sherlock Holmes, Wittgenstein, Acharya Prashant, Stephen Jenkinson and Martin Luther for clarity and illumination. I am beholden to the above influences and personalities. I crave your indulgence to excuse me for this long article. But I can assure you that it is worth reading and reflecting.

The virus is a reminder of our part in the web of relationship responsibility to other beings. It reminds us that the lives of bacteria, animals, insects, and plants all have a purpose and majesty intertwined with our own. It’s a reminder that the world is a tremendous, intelligent, evolving being. Mammals, mountains, birds, flowers and fungi collaborate in an exquisite dance of symbiosis, existing in a constant dialogue of give and take with the rest of world. The very air we breathe is brimming with biological matter, as the novel Corona virus so bluntly demonstrates.

The conflict in the world is because people are either stuck in their identity, and die for it, or shy away from their identity and lose their roots. One has to opt for a middle path. The ideal situation will be when every religion transcends its identity. Until that time, it is unwise for people to let go of their identity. We cannot, and should not, eliminate differences on this planet. We need to celebrate the differences. Identity is in no way contradictory to universality.

An identity is related to an action. Denial of identity will dump you in inaction, sloth and lethargy. Hence in Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna reminds Arjuna of his Kshatriya identity even while giving “Brahma gyan” to remind him of his duties and responsibilities. Otherwise while giving this High knowledge of the Self, why would Krishna remind him again and again of his limited identity. The limited identity in no way contradicts the universal one. A policeman cannot perform his duties — steer the traffic — if he fails to acknowledge his identity. Similarly, if a businessman shies away from his identity, he cannot function.

In his popular essay The Coronation, Charles Eisenstein proposes the following: “When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we have seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future.” Let us deeply value the perspectives that emerge from observation, patience, and introspection. These include the Ultimate, God, Truth, Knowledge, Myths, Body,& Death. These also include the patterns of sensations, emotions, fear and resistance.

The path of Knowledge and the Path of Negation :

The perplexing question often asked by many seekers is — ‘how is it possible to visualize God or Truth or the Ultimate within oneself’? Let us appreciate the way in which Acharya Prashant tackles and resolves this with his arguments — With charity in view and clarity in thought. At no point does Vedanta say that the Atma is within you. It is a gross misinterpretation, misunderstanding. There are the two principal paths. Looking within is primarily a feature of the path of knowledge. When you look within, it is not the Truth that you look at. When you look within, it is always your falseness and ignorance that you encounter. That’s why the path of knowledge is the path of negation ‘neti, neti’.

You look at everything that you can find within yourself. You look at it, scrutinize it closely, and you ask — is this the ultimate? Is this final? Timeless? Ever reliable? Never changing? And the inevitable and obvious answer every time is — ‘no, this is not that’. You look at your thoughts, emotions, deeply held beliefs, ideologies, identities, relationships, possessions, your entire knowledge, past, future and the hopes from future and you question ruthlessly. You do not just accept anything because it happens to be present in your own mind.

The path of knowledge is a path that requires tremendous honesty, and the result of that honesty is a foregone conclusion — whatever you look at with honesty just loses its charm. Not that you intend that to happen, your intention is probably to come up upon something that is beautiful, tremendous, magnificent, worth laying down your life for. But that does not quite happen. Maybe things have their sheen, their aura from a distance. We often may have to remind ourselves that thee characteristic of nature is “to manifest as manifold”; the characteristic of the Divine is “to absorb into unity”.

So, did you find God within? Well, no. All you are left with, is a void within. There is nothing that is found. All that was to be found was hacked down into pieces. When does Vedanta say that if you look within you will find God? At no place has it said that. When you say “within”, within what? This sack of skin? The skin, which is both an organ and the organ. All of us have a skin. It’s the interface between the outside world and us, the spatial marker of things that are mostly me, even if some of those things are on the way out such as breath and excrement, and things that are mostly not me, even if some of those are on the way in — breath and food. Sensation also begins with the skin. Every sensory receptor we have is part of the skin. Some of these receptors are mechanical, others are photosensitive.

When you say within, you surely mean some special arrangement within which you are trying to peep. That could be either the body or the mind. Are we trying to assert that the Atman is something that has special proportions? Only then it can be contained within something in space! Similarly, when you say that the ‘Atman is within me’, you probably must realise that you are saying you are bigger than the Atman! Any envelope has to be larger than the thing that it contains. Right?

What are we saying? We are saying, ‘I am big’. And when I say, ‘I am big’, I’m referring to the ego. Right? The ‘little Self’. I am big and the Atman is within me, so the Atman is smaller than me. All this talk of ‘my Atma’ or a ‘personal Self’, is pure ego nothing else. And when I say ‘pure’, I do not mean in sense of acceptance or affirmation. When I say, ‘pure ego’, I mean much the same as ‘pure poison’. Vedanta does not say that Atma is within you. Atma is that which cannot be contained in anything. Atma is that which does not even pervade space. Atma is that which you cannot even think of, talk of, not even imagine! So, how can then Atma be contained within you? So, no, Vedanta does not say that Atma is within you.

Truth, Visualzation and Myths :

Whenever the truth is to be visualised, the visualization is always done in all humility outside of yourself and therefore, the form that is given to Truth is kept as fantastic and para-human as possible. Why you have so many myths attached to those who have come to represent godliness — those myths are deliberate! Those myths were intended to keep the ego in check. If the supreme Truth were to be represented as an ordinary mortal; and that could be done, not that there would be something fundamentally or technically wrong with that, that could be done; then that might give the ego a good shot of nutrition! ‘See, that’s the final truth and that looks so much like me! And if the truth looks so much like me, why can’t I be the ultimate?’ That’s why in India you have deity with 8 hands, 40 heads, doing all kinds of unusual, abnormal, if not paranormal things. Obviously, those who conceptualized all that knew a bit about the basic laws of science and anatomy and genetics, but all that was deliberate.

So, God as an idea is helpful only if it helps you look at yourself and that is the purpose of spirituality — not to attain God so much, but to look honestly at yourself. Attainment of God is just a technique to dissolve the ego. God, then is not so much of a truth but actually a method. God is not the end. The end is dissolution of ego. The idea of God is a method, it’s a trick, it’s a way. It helps drill some humility into us, nothing more than that. First of all drop the idea that ‘we are all right as we are’. And even that is quite fashionable in spiritual circles today — ‘you are great and beautiful as you are’. If you are great and beautiful as you are, why did you require someone else to tell you that? You are great, so you should know all this on your own! One has to have the humility to firstly accept that things are not alright and from that humble acceptance a lot starts falling, you start getting unburdened, lightness comes to life.

Brahman has only two forms : gross and subtle, mortal and immortal, limited and unlimited, perceptible and imperceptible. Simplistically, therefore, when the Upani-shad repeatedly utters the mantra ‘neti, neti’, the first ‘neti’ negates the gross aspects of the universe i.e., tangible, material aspects (murta prapancha) sucha as the physical body. The second ‘neti’ negates subtle aspects (amurta prapancha) such as the mind and intellect. ‘Murta’ refers to shape and form. Whatever we can experience, see or think cannot be who-we-really-are, since there is always a subject witnessing these things. I am the consciousness-witness which remains when there is nothing to experience, as was seen when discussing the deep-sleep state in the analysis of the Upanishad.

Insights from Brahadaranyaka Upanishad, Sherlock Holmes and Wittgenstein :

Brahadaranyaka Upanishad 3.9.26 says : “The Self is that which has been described as ‘Not this, not this’. It is imperceptible, for it is never perceived; undecaying, for it never decays; unattached, for it is never attached; unfettered, for it never suffers and it does not perish.”

Ironically and apparently ridiculously, it is possible to make the statement that ‘after rejecting all the murta and amurta forms of the Atman and negating all the superimposed duality, what remains is the Atman. It is remarkable how similar this is to the statement by Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes : “When all has been investigated and rejected, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The Upanishads say “all that falls into the class of comprehensible (drrishya) is established as unreal.” Whatever you understand is false. What is real will always be beyond comprehension. What is said by the Upanishads is not the absolute truth. Words exist only in the empirical realm. The absolute truth is forever ineffable. This teaching is provided to lead you and point you in the right direction. The final leap is up to you.

To quote the penultimate paragraph from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus : “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless , when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.).” This is what Gaudapada (the Parama Guru of Adi Sankara) said over a thousand years earlier “That which is indescribable by words cannot be discriminated as true or false.” The reality has to be beyond both cause and effect and non-dual. There is no multiplicity.

The pattern of sensations, emotions, fear and resistance :

We feel the body as heaviness, as tension, as violence and so on. The concept is a pattern for the brain, so we must explore this pattern. Emotion is like a flow of water. If you try to stop the water, if you oppose a resistance, the water accumulates, and pushes harder, and harder, and harder. So, you must learn to let the sensation, let the emotion unravel without resistance. You must learn to let the sound, to let the feeling, to let the smell, to let the punch if you practice martial arts — unravel within you without any comment. Or, in the beginning, seeing how much you comment, how much you resist, how much you name, how much you criticize, how much you justify. If you feel the fear, where do you feel it? In your body. Where is it? In your throat, in your chest, in your belly etc., You feel it somewhere. And that somewhere is a defense, because the body tries to preserve its wholeness.

Enlarge the feeling and expand it in your whole body :

When you listen to music without deafening yourself, you listen with your whole body, you feel the music in your whole body. When you get punched, you must absorb the punch with your whole body. In the same way, when emotion arises, it must unravel in your whole body. Then it loses intensity. The larger something is, the faster it loses its velocity. If somebody slaps you with an open hand, it hurts. If you get punched with a closed fist, with the same power, it hurts more. If I punch you with just one knuckle, still more. If I use a knife, even more. Why? The smaller the area of impact, the more it’s going to hurt you. The larger it is, the less it impacts you. In the same way, when you enlarge the feeling, when you let it expand in your whole body, it loses velocity. Then you can let the whole emotion totally unravel. It will not only unravel within the body, it will expand beyond the body, and the tension will keep opening, and opening, and opening, until at some point it loses its characteristics as tension, and becomes non-separation with the whole.”

The brilliant analysis of Charles Eisenstein :

The mythology of Separation is what Charles Eisenstein named in ‘The Coronation’ as a “civilizational tilt” toward control. The solution template is, facing any problem, to find something to control — to quarantine, to track, to imprison, to wall out, to dominate, or to kill. If control fails, more control will fix it. To achieve social and material paradise, control everything, track every movement, monitor every word, record every transaction. Then there can be no more crime, no more infection, no more disinformation. When the entire ruling class accepts this formula and this vision, they will act in natural concert to increase their control. It is all for the greater good. When the public accepts it too, they will not resist it. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why. Nearing the end of April, official statistics say that about 150,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits.

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future? It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces — and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration. Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation? The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.” The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice.

Wisdom of Stephen Jenkinson :

With a master’s degree in theology from Harvard University and a master’s in social work from the University of Toronto, Stephen Jenkinson was the director of counseling services in the palliative care department at a major Canadian hospital in Toronto for several years. There he encountered the deep “death phobia” and “grief illiteracy” that most of his patients and their loved ones brought to their deathbeds. This work motivated Jenkinson to encourage people to prepare for their death well before its arrival so that they might be free to participate emotionally in their deaths as they participate in other major life events.

“I know that all of my enterprises will fail. I know that already. I am not holding out hope that somehow anything is going to change as a result of doing them. All I am trying to do is participate in some small way in the small collection of memories that will accompany my death. All I am trying to do is having a small part to play in what those memories might be. Understanding now, that the way I am proceeding is helping to author those things that people will remember. If they are inclined to. And there’s not much more to me than that. But that is not a recipe for futility. One of the things I learned at the deathbed is… that’s the whole thing. That’s the magic of it. Our willingness to remember turns out to be a kind of banquet… and the remembering is the food. And I think that is what we have to do in a rough time like this one (COVID 19), is that we have to give people even not yet born, we have to leave in the air a kind of an aroma… let’s call it ‘inconsolable possibility’ — a possibility that won’t be consoled into impotence.”

If we understand the fear of death — or, I would say the almost neurotic avoidance of death — to be “just part of being human,” two things happen. One is that we assume that everybody who answers to the description of “human” is similarly troubled and brought low by dying, which is clearly not true. And the second is that human nature is undone by exposure to death or by contemplation of death or by approaching death. In my view, this is also deeply untrue. What dying properly becomes in an intact culture is the opportunity — maybe the most glowing opportunity — for the fullness of your humanity to appear. Far from being your undoing, death becomes a showtime for your humanity. Sustenance is probably the glue that holds our corner of the universe together. That’s not just an emotional reality or a kind of fuzzy feeling; it’s observable. I farm, and the farm teaches you this every day. Very simply put it goes like this: Anything alive is “on the take,” whether it’s a plant, an animal, or a human, we’re all on the take. We have to eat every day. Somewhere along the way it hopefully dawns upon you that everything you take dies because you take it. Death is what’s nourishing you. If life was what was nourishing you, it would still be alive in the ground or in the field. But instead, it’s in your digestive system. It died to keep you alive. That’s the basic Christ example, obviously. The observable reality is this: it’s death that keeps life going. And it is your death that is the end of you being on the take, or should be. Death is when you finally give back. Every death before your own was probably a death that contributed in one way or another to your sustenance. I’m not talking about times of war or catastrophe; I’m talking about ordinary life; I’m talking about food. However, apply this understanding about food and expand it a little bit to recognize that for Westerners, our way of life is extraordinarily “on the take.” Some of us are waking up to that fact, and it would be great if more of us did.

Wisdom from Martin Luther King :

We should not forget our calling as human beings which is essentially a spiritual one. It is finding beauty and meaning in our lives and in our world. To achieve these lofty aims, we have to keep in our vision the poetic, mythic, and dharmic dimensions essential for a full and meaningful life. We must face the reality of things as they are and greet them with clarity, courage and wisdom and honesty. In this context, the reader may recall the quote attributed to Martin Luther who, when asked what he would do if he knew the world was to end tomorrow, is reported to have said, “If I knew the world was to end tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree today”. In other words, I will live in hope to the very end no matter what, for it is in hope, in trusting that things are as they should be, that I will be of any use to this world, in meeting its challenges and in serving life.