COVID-19, Fear, Pandemic

The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Trial by Fear

by Artemis Celt, ND

Recently I sat down in meditation with the intention of receiving whatever information I most needed about the coronavirus pandemic. Several times during the meditation the word crucible impressed itself like an embossed message on the surface of my otherwise undisturbed mind. “What the heck does crucible really mean?” I thought to myself as I concluded my meditation. I knew that Arthur Miller had written a popular play called The Crucible, though I had never read it. And associated with this play was a dim sense of something that might loom, with Plutonian intensity, over our ordinary daily lives. In an effort to bring some needed clarity to my feeble grasp of the word crucible, I consulted several online dictionaries. Here is the definition I found most pertinent: “A crucible is a situation of severe trial, or in which different elements interact, leading to the creation of something new.”

We are all acutely aware of how this pandemic and the subsequent shelter-in-place mandates have created unprecedented challenges for billions of people on Earth. For some, the main challenge is fear of contracting a serious viral infection or fear of unknowingly passing it on to a vulnerable member of our society. For others, the main challenge has been an abrupt loss of income. And for some, the imposed social isolation has proven to be very difficult. Concerns about current and potentially long-term losses of civil liberties are the biggest worries harbored by some. For others, having to suddenly alter daily work routines in order to accommodate children out of school has been a significant stressor.

These are all hardships, but a severe hardship is not the same thing as a severe trial. A trial is a kind of test: a test of physical endurance, or a test of moral integrity, a test of courage, a test of choosing love over fear, etc. In this article I would like to consider some of the ways this pandemic and the methods by which it is being managed have suddenly immersed us in a crucible: a severe test. I would also like to address the opportunity to create something new that this test affords us.

What kind of trial might this pandemic be? I can think of many kinds of trials that we are facing as a result of this pandemic, but first and foremost is the Trial of Fear.

Fear is a big topic, and thus the Trial of Fear involves more than one aspect of fear.

The First Aspect of Fear: War Consciousness

Once upon a time there were two French biologists and researchers, Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp. In the 1800s they each studied microorganisms and their effect on health, and they each came to a different conclusion. Pasteur, as we know, eventually won the day with his celebrated Germ Theory: diseases are caused by the presence and actions of specific microorganisms in the body. A medical system, such as our current orthodox Western medical system, that adopts this theory will focus on the identification and eradication of specific germs as a way of safeguarding health. This theory naturally leads to an “us vs them” mentality, whereby the bacteria, virus, or fungus becomes the feared “them” that we must protect ourselves against.

With its “us vs them” focus, the Germ Theory also naturally gives rise to a warlike mentality in which we humans take the starring role of victims who must put up a fight against “the other” that’s trying to destroy us. It also gives rise to entities like our modern pharmaceutical empire that produces weapons (antibiotics) that sometimes enable us to fight off the enemy (germs). This evening I read yet another news article that refers to the novel coronavirus as “the enemy,” and that describes our collective situation with respect to this pandemic as “being at war.” Some hospitals are now being referred to as “war zones.” The language of war is frequently used to describe and shape our relationship to this virus. It is also frequently used to describe our relationship to our massive drug problem, and to the widespread problem of cancer. Placing our relationship to this virus within the framework of war strongly fosters a state of fear in the public mind.

The language of war encourages us to look outside of ourselves and to look outside of the reality we have created on Earth. The problem then becomes “them,” rather than “us.” A war mentality discourages us from asking certain questions that might desperately need to be asked, such as: “What conditions on Earth and within the human body have made this widespread infection possible?” “How might this virus be a messenger of sorts – a warning signal that we are collectively so out of balance that a powerful messenger had to come forth in order to shake us out of our complacency?”

Is it wise to accept this “us and them” framework that is being foisted upon us? What are the consequences of accepting such a framework? Well, let’s take a look around. The consequences here in the US and in many other countries are plain as day. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but downtown Port Townsend where I live is a veritable ghost town. Vast numbers of people have become unemployed overnight. People are afraid to shake hands with each other. Children can’t go play with their friends. Well, there’s a war on, mate, so buck up and make the best of it. We are told that we might have to make the best of this severely restricted way of life for months, or possibly even a year¹—until the troops come to our rescue with a new vaccine.

Antoine Bechamp developed a theory that radically departs from Pasteur’s famous Germ Theory.

He maintained that unhealthy tissue is the true cause of disease, and that infections are a secondary consequence of this unhealthy tissue. Bechamp’s research led him to conclude that poor diet and other unwise lifestyle choices and emotional states create an oxygen-deficient, acidic cellular environment that lead to an unhealthy “terrain.” This has become known as the Terrain is Everything theory, whereby the human body and its relative state of health is the terrain.

If Bechamp’s theory is embraced, then focus is placed on maintaining a robustly healthy terrain—a healthy body and emotional state, and a healthy planet free of man-made pollutants—rather than going to war with germs. Microorganisms are not the root-cause problem, and therefore it makes little sense to fear them.

Ideally, this coronavirus experience will become an epic opportunity for humanity to understand that infectious diseases do not occur as isolated events in the absence of a larger context. We have an opportunity to understand that this novel coronavirus is not an enemy that has appeared out of nowhere. It has, rather, appeared within the context of our individual and collectively created physical and emotional terrains. Fortunately, we have already seen some efforts being made to understand this pandemic as part of a larger context. For example, it is widely understood that people with one or more serious comorbidities are particularly vulnerable to the virus. Both Wuhan and northern Italy have a significant air pollution problem, which damages lung tissue and makes for a poorer outcome with respiratory viruses. There is a high rate of cigarette smoking in men who live in these countries as well. Some people speculate that 5G might play a role. Perhaps there are certain emotions and/or beliefs that make it easier for this virus to gain entry.

There are undoubtedly other as yet unidentified factors that have compromised humanity’s terrain. We can, each and every one of us, look within and ask a question such as this: “Within the context of this pandemic, what’s the best way I can improve the quality of my terrain?” This is a great question to pose during meditation, or for dreamwork,² or as the basis for a shamanic journey.

The Second Aspect of Fear: Fear as a Means of Control

“If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid.” ~Paulo Coelho

In her excellent April 7 presentation, Making Sense of the Coronavirus Data,³ Dr. Pam Popper dives into the mechanics of how people were made to feel afraid during the swine flu (H1N1) epidemic of 2009/2010. And who were the purveyors of that fear? None other than our very own WHO and CDC. According to Dr. Popper, the original mortality rate of this flu was predicted to be a whopping 4%. But follow-up serological studies showed that the actual death rate was 0.01%. At some point during that flu season the CDC instructed health care practitioners to stop testing for H1N1 and to assume that anyone who presented with flu-like symptoms had H1N1 and to report it as such. This is, by the way, exactly what WHO and the National Vital Statistics System have begun advising practitioners to do during the current coronavirus outbreak.^4,5

Why would practitioners be encouraged to state that COVID-19 is the presumed cause of death without doing actual testing? This maneuver, which flies in the face of evidence-based medicine, will falsely inflate the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 and can thus be used to bolster “evidence” that validates the use of lockdowns and vaccination programs.

It is not my purpose in this article to address all of the purported reasons – and there are many – why various players on the COVID-19 stage might want to whip the public up into a state of fear. These purported reasons are covered adequately in the alternative press and in various alternative health websites. I would like to address just one of these reasons: The World Health Organization is in bed with pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines, and vaccines have the potential to rake in billions of dollars. If you can frighten people by making them believe that there is a particularly deadly flu going around, then they will line up in droves for the vaccine that will allegedly give them immunity to the virus. The following sentence will illuminate why I used the word allegedly. In the case of the swine flu, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Social, Health and Family Affairs eventually determined that “WHO colluded with drug companies, turning a run-of-the-mill flu into a pandemic. Drug companies benefited financially, millions of people were vaccinated without cause, and without evidence that the vaccine was effective since it wasn’t clinically tested.”³ (italics are my addition) Given their appallingly poor track record during the swine flu epidemic, it seems prudent to carefully scrutinize any agendas based on WHO and CDC pandemic alerts.

We have been told by experts that millions of Americans could die from the coronavirus epidemic.^6,7 In early March, WHO announced that the mortality rate from COVID-19 was an alarming 3.4%.⁸ But let’s look at some current numbers. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s projected number of cumulative US deaths from COVID-19 up to August 4, 2020 is 61,545.⁹ Yes, you read that correctly: 61,545. For comparison, the CDC estimates that the total number of deaths in the US from the flu this season (October 2019 through April 4, 2020) will be 24,000 to 62,000.¹⁰ Many will say that the low projected number of 61,545 deaths is due to the grand success of the lockdowns, and perhaps there is some truth to this. But given the extreme global hardships that lockdowns have caused thus far, we must know beyond a shadow of a doubt if this is merely an assumption or if it is a proven fact.^11,12

When fear is selected as a primary means of control, certain tools must be used to get the job done. It goes without saying that the biggest hammer in this particular toolbox is the mainstream media. The media does the bidding of its masters with consummate skill.¹³ As one friend of mine recently remarked: “The mainstream media is having a feeding frenzy with this pandemic.” In light of this we might do well to ask: “when there’s a feeding frenzy in the works, who ultimately gets fed and who gets eaten?”

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.^14,15 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.¹⁶ 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.”¹⁷

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 incubation¹⁸ 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.”¹⁹ 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.¹⁷ 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

1. Resnick B. Scientists warn we may need to live with social distancing for a year or more. Vox. March 17, 2020.

2. http://www.deitycentral.com/the-importance-of-dreams

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modKe1XeFLA

4. https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/

5. https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/us-gov-health-statistics-agency-directs-hospitals-confirm-suspected-covid-19-deat1

6. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/the-coronavirus-could-kill-millions-of-americans-cdc-advisor-says.html

7. Lerner S. 2.2 million people in the US could die if coronavirus goes unchecked. The Intercept. March 17, 2020.

8. Perper R. WHO says the coronavirus global death rate is 3.4%, higher than earlier figures. ScienceAlert.com. March 5, 2020.

9. https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

10. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

11. Gøtzsche, Peter C. The Coronavirus mass panic is not justified. March 24, 2020. https://www.deadlymedicines.dk/wp-content/uploads/Gøtzsche-The-Coronavirus-mass-panic-is-not-justified.pdf

12. https://www.professorhinkley.com/blog/why-is-oregon-still-on-lock-down

13. https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media-infographic/

14. https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/la-mayor-pushes-residents-to-rat-out-those-who-violate-stay-at-home-order-snitches-get-rewards/

15. https://wkow.com/2020/03/19/heres-how-to-report-gatherings-of-10-or-more-people-to-authorities/

16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXPfqCFwa4&fbclid=IwAR0mG6TK6WVsK7gCIcWOymcCPDQZvxUplXMfFrKGO2dALWK1TSP0i5PpBxE

17. https://www.albertojosevarela.com/en/the-creator-of-the-coronavirus-speaks-i-take-responsibility-for-having-created-it/

18. https://dreamstudies.org/2009/08/31/how-to-incubate-a-dream/

19. https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=3