Pandemic and truth

The incomprehensible

“God is close, but difficult to grasp,” wrote Friedrich Hölderlin in Patmos. At the moment, this applies to the novel coronavirus Covid-19, as it does to all viruses and, on closer inspection, to almost everything else that exists.
Close and hard to grasp”: you can be a carrier of the virus, i.e. you can carry it inside you and, without knowing it, kill people around you by millions of virus-laden droplets in the air you exhale. Just by performing the most basic movement of life: inhaling and exhaling. Conversely, you can catch those viral droplets from someone you happen to meet in the supermarket, breathe them in, and suddenly you have ‘corona’. If you really celebrate life, for example by dancing, laughing and running around, the chances of infection multiply.
If you inhale it, rub it in your eyes or get it on your tongue, in the best case scenario the virus will be defeated by your own immune system before it can cause any symptoms. For the vast majority of people, this seems to be the case. At worst, it will kill you – no, actually, your own immune response will kill you, whether through excessive inflammation of the lungs and other organs, or blood clotting that suddenly behaves as if the blood vessels were not working properly.
The truth is close and hard to grasp. I dare to borrow Hölderlin’s elegant phrase to highlight what I believe to be the most powerful symptom of this pandemic: the disappearance of truth. “Truth” in its most modest sense, as information about facts, or to put it simply: “It’s just true”. Since the Covid-19 pandemic became known, it has been impossible to learn, think or say anything about the Covid-19 pandemic that is not immediately refuted by the direct opposite, with apparently the same evidence.
No matter what field you look at, be it scientific debate, political decision-making, statistics, economics, the magical world of conspiracy theories, the media or everyday common sense, which processes everything in terms of the paradigm of ‘normal flu’, everywhere the given seems to disappear into a kind of intangibility the closer you get to it and the more firmly you grasp it. A friend put it succinctly: If they hadn’t tested, would we have noticed anything? The counter-question is already nodding: ‘Yes, but what about all the deaths in England, Italy, Spain, France, New York?’ It’s like soap in the brain. The ‘real’ in reality becomes a matter of opinion (in a sense it always has been, but more on that elsewhere).

Truth and Consciousness What can ‘truth’ be or perhaps even achieve in times of pandemic, when it is as close and yet as elusive as a virus or God Himself? How and where can you find something that is ‘true’?
What is true is what works. It creates immediate reality. Everyone can see their truth in what is working right now. It determines their reality. So if we want to know the truth of a person, we have to look at the reality they live in. Realities can differ in ways that are almost unimaginable. The ‘objective reality’ that they tried to teach me in civics class in the GDR is a fantastic and rather childish fairy tale that effectively simplified the world. But even in the same human life, we live through realities that sometimes directly contradict each other. A few examples:
For the unborn child in the womb, there are no differences. It lives in symbiosis with its mother; they are each other’s reality. Everything she experiences, it experiences too. Everything is equally true, creates reality and has an effect as it grows into and becomes part of the unborn child. At this stage there is no difference between what is and what I think it is. I cannot and do not want to distinguish between the two.
If the mother, i.e. the environment on which one is totally dependent, suddenly changes dramatically, for example if she falls ill, goes into shock or becomes very frightened, the unborn child perceives this as a serious threat and reacts immediately in order to stay alive. It restricts its vitality, for example by reducing movement and metabolic activity. I will reduce my vitality to have a better chance of survival’ is the oldest survival pattern there is.
In May 2020, in times of pandemic, this pattern seems to be taking place on an almost global and sometimes breathtaking scale: movement and exchange, the central characteristics of our vitality, are being more or less severely restricted, with regional and national differences, in order to ensure the survival of life, especially the survival of people who are considered to be at risk. For whole societies, as well as for children in the womb, this is always a risky process: self-restraint can, in turn, become dangerous and cost the very life it was intended to protect. However, in the early stages of our consciousness (Nelles’ symbiotic unity consciousness), in the earliest form of ‘being in the world’, there are no alternatives.
After birth, everything depends on the child being noticed, fed and held by its mother. Otherwise it must die, at least in its own perception. In the child’s reality, truth is first and foremost linked to what its own sex, parents, family, country, social environment, in short, the circumstances in which it grows up, dictate. Since it depends on these people and circumstances for its life and death, it finds its truth in them. For it is they who act in his life and create reality. In its fundamental dependence, it needs above all a secure truth. It quickly perceives uncertainty as a threat to its life. A child seeks secure, preferably absolute truths in order to feel secure.
Human groups often live in this childlike consciousness. In times of perceived threat – be it war, earthquake, financial crisis or pandemic, it does not matter – ‘the group’ is felt to be more important for survival than in more relaxed times. The greater the perceived threat, the greater the perceived need for security, for unshakable, unquestionable, absolute truth. Tell us what is true, and tell us with certainty, otherwise we will be afraid of death, and then we cannot guarantee anything. They only feel safe when ‘mum’ or ‘dad’ – internally transferred to leaders such as politicians, scientists, business leaders, opinion leaders on the internet or in the street – explain the world to them in a plausible and reassuring way and put it in order for them. Just as they would have wanted their parents to do for them as children.
Human groups at this stage, be they tribes, nationalities, religious communities or even political allies, fan clubs or music fans, unconsciously create absolute truths that they can rely on, trust and ‘believe in’. These truths then represent the ‘good mother’ or ‘good father’, i.e. inner figures who can give the child’s soul the security it needs. Absolute truths in the group consciousness usually take the form of a god, shaped according to the current need for security.
They are upheld, defended and propagated – always driven by the child’s unconscious need for security. When the world behaves differently than the respective absolute truth allows, people in group consciousness (according to Nelles) react like children. In child consciousness, I as an adult react to the virus in the same way as I did as a threatened and insecure child. I want someone to take it away or tell me it’s not so bad. Childish group consciousness makes people more and more desperate to find someone who will finally resolve the situation, or at least explain it in such a way that it is not so bad.
In times of pandemic, those who, because of a very concrete leadership responsibility, cannot satisfy the group’s childlike need for security, because reality is not safe at that moment, make the group feel ‘fooled’. This is a childlike or, more precisely, a victim feeling (both are psychologically the same). They need a consistent, predictable and safe world. If this does not happen, they withdraw and end up believing ‘nothing’. Children cannot help themselves; they retreat into inner emigration when their parents are inconsistent. In the event of a pandemic, adults may feel the same as they did then. The childhood truth that you cannot really rely on anything comes into play. The psychological effect, in the inner world, is the same: inner emigration once again.
Like any major crisis, the pandemic pulls the cover off everything that has been waiting to come out for a long time. This means that how people react to the pandemic has a lot to do with how they dealt with threats as unborn babies and then as children, and what they still fall back on when their environment feels similarly threatening today. We only have options other than childish ones when we realise that we are no longer children. It seems to me that the pandemic is forcing many people to grow up faster than usual in order to cope with it.
Before that can happen, however, the truth is taking us a little further away from reality, or in other words, from what is happening in a pandemic.

We are all descended from pandemic survivors. If our early ancestors had not survived the plague, cholera or, later, the Spanish flu, we would not be here today. Survivors leave everything they have survived to their descendants, not by design, but simply because, as survivors, they are the ones who can continue to reproduce. That is the principle of evolution. It applies not only to our external, physical constitution, but also to its internal mirror, our psyche.
At every perceived threat, it does the same thing as our body: it suppresses its own vitality for the sake of a better chance of survival. In myself, as in most people I talk to at the moment, this basic psychological process seems to be very active at the moment. It is consuming a lot of energy in the background, in the unconscious. This is what I associate with the general slowing down, fatigue and in some cases exhaustion. For the psyche the truth at the moment is: I may be in mortal danger.
This is the background against which science is working. For months, internationally renowned experts on viruses, epidemics and protection against them have been devoting their trained minds, expertise and enormous material resources to researching and combating the new coronavirus. They present results, always new, based on the only possible gradual progress of knowledge. Sometimes the results of different efforts agree, sometimes they contradict each other. That is why this process is called ‘research’ and not ‘legislation’.
In the childish mind, contradictory truths create a sense of insecurity and threat, as if the mother on whom life depends were to say something benign while radiating the exact opposite. In the adolescent or pubertal mind, contradictions create a struggle. The adolescent mind wants and needs to eradicate uncertainty and threat for the sake of its own survival. It has to break out of its familiar childhood circumstances and protect itself (and thus the inner child) as comprehensively as possible from such threats in the future in order to be able to live self-determinedly in its self-made (‘autonomous’) reality. The adolescent mind hates predetermined realities like the devil hates holy water.
The adolescent mind structures and limits modern consciousness in the Western world. When presented with data that challenges its image of the world, of others and of itself, it goes into survival mode: it defends its inner image of reality as ‘the truth’. And it wants to subordinate ‘reality’ to its inner image, unconditionally, now and for all time. To this end it explores the world. The desire to understand is the most prominent control mechanism available to modern consciousness. At the same time it leads to a total dead end.
I see this most clearly in the Internet. The Internet has only been around for a few decades; in terms of its development it is, so to speak, brand new. It seems to me like the inner world of a being with millions of multiple personalities: everything is happening simultaneously. Everything is equally important. However, we always hear the voices that signal a perceived threat first because our attention is unconsciously focused at all times on the messages that are most important for our survival. The world of entertainment, media and, of course, advertising is based on this principle.
Now, on the Internet, everything is virtual, i.e. not ‘real’ in the sense of physical reality. The Internet transports nothing more than digitised images of countless physical realities, all at the same time. In this respect it corresponds to our modern consciousness, the consciousness of the self. Self-consciousness lives in its images of the world. It considers its own image of the world to be more real than the world itself. The inner image of the world, of others and of one’s own life has ‘the truth’ in the same life-determining way as the behaviour of the parents had for the child or the womb had for the unborn child. The consequence of this is that for the ego-consciousness there is no truth outside its horizon, even though and precisely because it is constantly searching for it with the help of science.
Let us return to our example of science in times of pandemic. It shows that no matter what individual researchers, teams or companies discover and implement, they will not be able to establish a general truth about ‘the virus’. This truth would have the status of something predetermined, i.e. something that acts independently of one’s own perception, state of mind and world view, and thus creates reality. Such a given, however, is the mortal enemy of modern consciousness, because it renders the dominance of one’s own worldview as obsolete as a concrete wall that one keeps running into. The given is stronger, more powerful and therefore ‘truer’ than one’s own conception of things, and that cannot be, because it creates a perceived life-threatening threat.
Self-knowledge and the immediate truth of the given are mutually exclusive. With its insatiable urge to explain the world, it tries to transform the realities of existence into inner images, such as consistent explanations à la natural laws, because this makes it feel more secure than in direct, naked contact with what is. The more self-consciousness becomes established in the world, the less we will be able to communicate with each other about generally accepted facts and their truth. My friend and colleague Coen Aalders (Utrecht, NL) has illustrated this in a remarkable article on the age of fake news.
In my opinion, there is currently no way out of this situation. There are only different ways of dealing with it, such as political action that follows a certain scientific perception and imposes restrictions on contact. Then there is protest against these measures. Then there is the shifting of one’s own insecurity outwards in the form of accusations, denigration or even demonisation of other people, groups or even entire states.
The battle cry of this shift is ‘freedom of expression’. It is often used with the same bitter determination as the sword or submachine gun in the final stages of armed conflict. I see the youthful sense of self in real danger, not from the presence of a virus and the resulting pandemic, but from the inevitability of these phenomena.
The most prominent victim of a pandemic in the age of modern consciousness is truth. Not because no one wants to hear it, but because everyone is looking for it. The more it is sought, the more elusive it becomes. The more relentlessly it is defended, the more inevitably it disappears. I have never seen a clearer mirror of how modern consciousness works.
There’s nothing you can do about it, ‘there’s no exit except the one you can’t see with your eyes’, as Bob Dylan once said. If we want to encounter something true, something that has an immediate effect and ‘just feels right’, then we must fully expose ourselves to how modern consciousness operates in this pandemic without resistance. In doing so, we encounter the only truth that works: our own. Only my own truth creates my reality for me. Other truths do this for others, but not necessarily for me. A common truth is limited to the fact that we are obviously here. Nothing more can be said. But nothing more is needed to live, even in times of pandemic.

What works I see how the crisis that is developing out of the pandemic is hitting almost everyone in the known world to the core of their accustomed way of life, without the slightest mercy. In an unprecedented way, the various government protective measures are forcing us all to do things we would probably never do voluntarily: To keep our distance from our loved ones, even if they are sick or dying; as children, to stay indoors for weeks on end when the weather is fine; as a family, to sit on top of each other without distraction; as entrepreneurs, to let our own businesses, and thus our economic livelihoods, go down the drain; as workers, to accept short-time work or unemployment, or to work ourselves to death in ‘systemically important jobs’; as citizens, to give up hard-earned jobs in ‘systemically important professions’; as citizens, to give up hard-won civil liberties, to look like crazy bank robbers with the help of all kinds of masks, to go beyond our own limits in direct medical contact with Covid-19 patients; as political leaders, to paralyse the basic structures of our external world with breathtaking speed and breathtaking radicalism; as those directly affected, to fight fiercely against our own community in the form of the state, or to trust the same state above all else. Basically, the pandemic exposes everyone for what they are. This is often very unfamiliar and sometimes almost unbearable.
I see how the pandemic puts us all in a certain place and blocks other places that might have been accessible before. Like a wall that suddenly appears where you used to be able to walk. In the film of the same name, ‘The Wall’, an invisible and insurmountable barrier suddenly appears in the middle of the landscape. It changes everything irrevocably. Each place that the pandemic, or more precisely the crisis that it brings, takes us to has its own truth. It is what that place does to us. My place, for example, has its truth in relative inactivity. My usual work, therapeutic and educational activities with groups of people of various sizes, is currently denied to me. I became anxious, had sleepless nights, literally climbed the walls. It felt like an indefinite but acute danger to my life, until at some point it became quiet. More precisely, until I allowed the silence to enter me.
Then, and only then, did the forced inactivity begin to open up its resources and take effect. It is working, and that means it is becoming true, in the sense that it is now right for me. I am free and alive in a new way, even though, or perhaps because, I cannot do what I usually do. This process repeats itself with gradual differences, but the paralysis and panic that lurk within it have disappeared.
Someone once said, ‘The truth will set you free’. It was Jesus, a man of old. I think he knew what he was talking about. As a person of modern consciousness today, I understand that the only truth available to a human being is that of his consciousness. Whenever you surrender to it, you become free. The ‘place’ that the crisis has given you is ultimately your present consciousness, the ‘how’ of your inner life. It determines what you experience, what you feel, what you can and cannot do.
I see that even the truth of a pandemic or global crisis is not static or absolute. It moves and changes from moment to moment. This can drive you mad as long as you are unable to separate yourself from it, as in the pre-birth symbiosis, as long as you relate every change in this truth directly to yourself, as children do, and as long as you approach every movement of truth critically, questioningly and inquisitively, using your own world view as a yardstick, as young people do.
Adults live differently. For them, too, the truth is constantly changing. They have experienced that the only certainty in this world is the incomprehensible silence within themselves, from moment to moment. The measure of ‘I am threatened’ or ‘I am safe at the moment’ is no longer so much in external events and their evaluation by my world view. It lies more within, where there are no values, no standards and no concepts, only silence. This is where the life we have been given pulsates, completely independent of what is happening outside.
Adults learn to constantly redirect the precious energy of their attention away from the external, the threatening, the stressful and the annoying, and towards the inner, where it is still and where everything can be as it seems. Where you direct your energy is where it gains strength. You can feed panic mode with energy or you can feed your inner stillness. We have this choice; it doesn’t always work, but it does work all the time. By focusing my attention on the stillness, it becomes effective and thus becomes my truth. It becomes visible in how I act, feel and think.
The pandemic kills all truth as long as you look for it outside yourself. It always wins as long as you let facts, opinions and strategies fight each other in the battle for truth. Facts, opinions and strategies’ always represent inner images and unconscious rescue patterns. The pandemic brings the truth to life as long as you allow yourself to be where the crisis takes you, both internally and externally.
You will experience your inner teenager taking to the barricades and crying ‘betrayal’. You will experience your inner child retreating into a dark corner, disturbed because ‘suddenly everything is so strange’. You may also experience how the unborn child you once were feels that its short life is coming to an end and is already preparing for it. All of this is perfectly all right; it is even inevitable. The only thing that is real is your own living awareness that perceives all this and allows it to happen. It alone allows us to act as the moment demands. It is what has an effect.
May 2020

Truth and Consciousness In times of pandemic, what can ‘truth’ be, or perhaps even achieve, when it is as close and yet as elusive as a virus or God himself? How and where can you find something that is ‘true’?
What is true is what works. It creates immediate reality. Everyone can see their truth in what is working right now. It determines their reality. So if we want to know the truth of a person, we have to look at the reality they live in. Realities can differ in ways that are almost unimaginable. The ‘objective reality’ that they tried to teach me in civics class in the GDR is a fantastic and rather childish fairy tale that effectively simplified the world. But even in the same human life we go through realities that sometimes directly contradict each other. A few examples:
For the unborn child in the womb, there are no differences. It lives in symbiosis with its mother; they are each other’s reality. Everything she experiences, it experiences too. Everything is equally true, creates reality and has an effect as it grows into and becomes part of the unborn child. At this stage there is no difference between what is and what I think it is. I cannot and do not want to distinguish between the two.
If the mother, i.e. the environment on which one is totally dependent, suddenly changes dramatically, for example if she falls ill, goes into shock or becomes very frightened, the unborn child perceives this as a serious threat and reacts immediately in order to stay alive. It restricts its vitality, for example by reducing movement and metabolic activity. I will reduce my vitality to have a better chance of survival’ is the oldest survival pattern there is.
In May 2020, in times of pandemic, this pattern seems to be taking place on an almost global and sometimes breathtaking scale: movement and exchange, the central characteristics of our vitality, are being more or less severely restricted, with regional and national differences, in order to ensure the survival of life, especially the survival of people who are considered to be at risk. For whole societies, as well as for children in the womb, this is always a risky process: self-restraint can, in turn, become dangerous and cost the very life it was intended to protect. However, in the early stages of our consciousness (Nelles’ symbiotic unity consciousness), in the earliest form of ‘being in the world’, there are no alternatives.
After birth, everything depends on the child being noticed, fed and held by its mother. Otherwise it must die, at least in its own perception. In the child’s reality, truth is first and foremost linked to what its own sex, parents, family, country, social environment, in short, the circumstances in which it grows up, dictate. Since it depends on these people and circumstances for its life and death, it finds its truth in them. For it is they who act in his life and create reality. In its fundamental dependence, it needs above all a secure truth. It quickly perceives uncertainty as a threat to its life. A child seeks secure, preferably absolute truths in order to feel secure.
Human groups often live in this childlike consciousness. In times of perceived threat – be it war, earthquake, financial crisis or pandemic, it doesn’t matter – ‘the group’ is felt to be more important for survival than in more relaxed times. The greater the perceived threat, the greater the perceived need for security, for unshakable, unquestionable, absolute truth. Tell us what is true, and tell us with certainty, otherwise we will be afraid of death, and then we can guarantee nothing. They only feel safe when ‘mum’ or ‘dad’ – internally transferred to leaders such as politicians, scientists, business leaders, opinion leaders on the internet or on the street – explain the world to them in a plausible and reassuring way and put it in order for them. Just as they would have wanted their parents to do for them when they were children.
Human groups at this stage, be they tribes, nationalities, religious communities or even political allies, fan clubs or music fans, unconsciously create absolute truths that they can rely on, trust and ‘believe in’. These truths then represent the ‘good mother’ or ‘good father’, i.e. inner figures who can give the child’s soul the security it needs. Absolute truths in the group consciousness usually take the form of a god, shaped according to the current need for security.
They are upheld, defended and propagated – always driven by the child’s unconscious need for security. When the world behaves differently than the respective absolute truth allows, people in group consciousness (according to Nelles) react like children. In child consciousness, I as an adult react to the virus in the same way as I did as a threatened and insecure child. I want someone to take it away or tell me it’s not so bad. Childish group consciousness makes people more and more desperate to find someone who will finally resolve the situation, or at least explain it in such a way that it is not so bad.
In times of pandemic, those who, because of a very concrete leadership responsibility, cannot satisfy the group’s childlike need for security, because reality is not safe at that moment, make the group feel ‘fooled’. This is a childlike or, more precisely, a victim feeling (both are psychologically the same). They need a consistent, predictable and safe world. If this does not happen, they withdraw and end up believing ‘nothing’. Children cannot help it; they retreat into inner emigration when their parents are inconsistent. In the event of a pandemic, adults may feel the same as they did then. Then the childhood truth that nothing can really be relied upon comes back to haunt them. The psychological effect, in the inner world, is the same: inner emigration once again.
Like any major crisis, the pandemic pulls the cover off everything that has been waiting to come out for a long time. This means that how people react to the pandemic has a lot to do with how they dealt with threats as unborn babies and then as children, and what they still fall back on when their environment feels similarly threatening today. We only have options other than childish ones when we realise that we are no longer children. It seems to me that the pandemic is forcing many people to grow up faster than usual in order to cope with it.
But before that can happen, the truth will take us a little further away from reality, or in other words, from what happens in a pandemic.

We are all descended from pandemic survivors. If our early ancestors had not survived the plague, cholera or, later, the Spanish flu, we would not be here today. Survivors leave everything they have to their descendants, not by design, but simply because, as survivors, they are the ones who can continue to reproduce. That is the principle of evolution. It applies not only to our external, physical constitution, but also to its internal mirror, our psyche.
At every perceived threat, it does the same thing as our body: it suppresses its own vitality for the sake of a better chance of survival. In myself, as in most people I talk to at the moment, this basic psychological process seems to be very active at the moment. It is consuming a lot of energy in the background, in the unconscious. I associate this primarily with a general slowing down, fatigue and, in some cases, exhaustion. For the psyche the truth at the moment is: I may be in mortal danger.
This is the background against which science is working. For months, internationally renowned experts on viruses, epidemics and protection against them have been devoting their trained minds, expertise and enormous material resources to researching and combating the new coronavirus. They present results, always new, based on the only possible gradual progress of knowledge. Sometimes the results of different efforts agree, sometimes they contradict each other. That is why this process is called ‘research’ and not ‘legislation’.
In the childish mind, contradictory truths create a sense of insecurity and threat, as if the mother on whom life depends were to say something benign while radiating the exact opposite. In the adolescent or pubertal mind, contradictions create a struggle. The adolescent mind wants and needs to eradicate uncertainty and threat for the sake of its own survival. It has to break out of its familiar childhood circumstances and protect itself (and thus the inner child) as comprehensively as possible from such threats in the future in order to be able to live self-determinedly in its self-made (‘autonomous’) reality. The adolescent mind hates predetermined realities like the devil hates holy water.
The adolescent mind structures and limits modern consciousness in the Western world. When presented with data that challenges its image of the world, of others and of itself, it goes into survival mode: it defends its inner image of reality as ‘the truth’. And it wants to subordinate ‘reality’ to its inner image, unconditionally, now and for all time. To this end it explores the world. The desire to understand is the most prominent control mechanism available to modern consciousness. At the same time it leads to a total dead end.
I see this most clearly in the Internet. The Internet has only been around for a few decades; in terms of its development it is, so to speak, brand new. It seems to me like the inner world of a being with millions of multiple personalities: everything is happening simultaneously. Everything is equally important. However, we always hear the voices that signal a perceived threat first, because our attention is unconsciously focused at all times on the messages that are most important for our survival. The world of entertainment, media and, of course, advertising is based on this principle.
Now, on the Internet, everything is virtual, i.e. not ‘real’ in the sense of physical reality. The Internet transports nothing more than digitised images of countless physical realities, all at the same time. In this respect it corresponds to our modern consciousness, the consciousness of the self. Self-consciousness lives in its images of the world. It considers its own image of the world to be more real than the world itself. The inner image of the world, of others and of one’s own life has ‘truth’ in the same life-determining way as the behaviour of the parents had for the child or the womb had for the unborn child. The consequence of this is that for the ego-consciousness there is no truth outside its horizon, even though and precisely because it is constantly searching for it with the help of science.
Let us return to our example of science in times of pandemic. It shows that no matter what individual researchers, teams or companies discover and implement, they will not be able to establish a general truth about ‘the virus’. This truth would have the status of something predetermined, i.e. something that acts independently of one’s own perception, state of mind and world view, and thus creates reality. Such a given, however, is the mortal enemy of modern consciousness, because it renders the dominance of one’s own worldview as obsolete as a concrete wall that one keeps running into. The given is stronger, more powerful and therefore ‘truer’ than one’s own conception of things, and that cannot be, because it creates a perceived life-threatening threat.
Self-knowledge and the immediate truth of the given are mutually exclusive. With its insatiable urge to explain the world, it tries to transform the realities of existence into inner images, such as consistent explanations à la natural laws, because this makes it feel more secure than in direct, naked contact with what is. The more self-consciousness becomes established in the world, the less we will be able to communicate with each other about generally accepted facts and their truth. My friend and colleague Coen Aalders (Utrecht, NL) has illustrated this in a remarkable article on the age of fake news.
In my opinion, there is currently no way out of this situation. There are only different ways of dealing with it, such as political action that follows a certain scientific perception and imposes restrictions on contact. Then there is protest against these measures. Then there is the shifting of one’s own insecurity outwards in the form of accusations, denigration or even demonisation of other people, groups or even entire states.
The battle cry of this shift is ‘freedom of expression’. It is often used with the same bitter determination as the sword or submachine gun in the final stages of armed conflict. I see the youthful sense of self in real danger, not from the presence of a virus and the resulting pandemic, but from the inevitability of these phenomena.
The most prominent victim of a pandemic in the age of modern consciousness is truth. Not because no one wants to hear it, but because everyone is looking for it. The more it is sought, the more elusive it becomes. The more relentlessly it is defended, the more inevitably it disappears. I have never seen a clearer mirror of how modern consciousness works.
There’s nothing you can do about it, ‘there’s no exit except the one you can’t see with your eyes’, as Bob Dylan once said. If we want to encounter something true, something that has an immediate effect and ‘just feels right’, then we must fully expose ourselves to how modern consciousness operates in this pandemic without resistance. In doing so, we encounter the only truth that works: our own. Only my own truth creates my reality for me. Other truths do this for others, but not necessarily for me. A common truth is limited to the fact that we are obviously here. Nothing more can be said. But nothing more is needed to live, even in times of pandemic.

What is effective

I observe how the crisis arising from the pandemic affects almost everyone in the known world without the slightest mercy, striking at the heart of our accustomed way of life. In an unprecedented way, the various government protection measures are forcing us all to do things we might never do voluntarily: To keep our distance from our loved ones, even if they are ill or dying; to stay cooped up in our rooms for weeks as children when the weather is fine, to sit on top of each other as a family without any distractions, to let our businesses and thus our economic livelihoods go down the drain as entrepreneurs, to accept short-time work or unemployment as employees, or to work ourselves to exhaustion in ‘systemically important professions’, to give up freedoms that were once hard-won as citizens, all of us, with the help of various masks, appearing like crazy bank robbers, overstepping our own limits in direct medical contact with Covid-19 patients, as political leaders paralysing the basic structures of our external world with breathtaking speed and radicalism, as those directly affected fighting against their own community in the form of the state or trusting this state above all else. In essence, the pandemic exposes each and every one of us. This is often very unfamiliar and sometimes almost unbearable.
I see how the pandemic puts us all in a certain place and blocks other places that might have been accessible before. Like a wall that suddenly stands where you could walk before. In the film of the same name, ‘The Wall’, an invisible and insurmountable barrier suddenly appears in the middle of the landscape. It changes everything irrevocably. Each place that the pandemic, or more precisely the crisis that it brings, takes us to has its own truth. It is what that place does to us. My place, for example, has its truth in relative inactivity. My usual work, therapeutic and educational activities with groups of people of various sizes, is currently denied to me. I became anxious, had sleepless nights, literally climbed the walls. It felt like an indefinite but acute danger to my life, until at some point it became quiet. More precisely, until I allowed the silence to enter me.
Then, and only then, did the forced inactivity begin to open up its resources and take effect. It is working, and that means it is becoming true, in the sense that it is now right for me. I am free and alive in a new way, even though, or perhaps because, I cannot do what I usually do. This process repeats itself with gradual differences, but the paralysis and panic that lurk within it have disappeared.
Someone once said, ‘The truth will set you free’. It was Jesus, a man of old. I think he knew what he was talking about. As a person of modern consciousness today, I understand that the only truth available to a human being is that of his consciousness. Whenever you surrender to it, you become free. The ‘place’ that the crisis has given you is ultimately your present consciousness, the ‘how’ of your inner life. It determines what you experience, what you feel, what you can and cannot do.
I see that even the truth of a pandemic or global crisis is not static or absolute. It moves and changes from moment to moment. This can drive you mad as long as you are unable to separate yourself from it, as in pre-birth symbiosis, as long as you relate every change in that truth directly to yourself, as children do, and as long as you approach every movement of truth critically, questioningly and inquisitively, using your own world view as a yardstick, as young people do.
Adults live differently. For them, too, the truth is constantly changing. They have experienced that the only certainty in this world is the incomprehensible silence within themselves, from moment to moment. The measure of ‘I am threatened’ or ‘I am safe at the moment’ is no longer so much in external events and their evaluation by my world view. It lies more within, where there are no values, no standards and no concepts, only silence. This is where the life we have been given pulsates, completely independent of what is happening outside.
Adults learn to constantly redirect the precious energy of their attention away from the external, the threatening, the stressful and the annoying, and towards the inner, where it is still and where everything can be as it seems. Where you direct your energy is where it gains strength. You can feed panic mode with energy or you can feed your inner stillness. We have this choice; it doesn’t always work, but it does work all the time. By focusing my attention on the stillness, it becomes effective and thus becomes my truth. It becomes visible in how I act, feel and think.
The pandemic kills all truth as long as you look for it outside yourself. It always wins as long as you let facts, opinions and strategies fight each other in the battle for truth. Facts, opinions and strategies’ always represent only inner images and unconscious salvation patterns. The pandemic brings the truth to life as long as you allow yourself to be where the crisis takes you, both internally and externally.
You will experience your inner teenager taking to the barricades and crying ‘betrayal’. You will experience your inner child retreating into a dark corner, disturbed because ‘suddenly everything is so strange’. You may also experience how the unborn child you once were feels that its short life is coming to an end and is already preparing for it. All of this is perfectly all right; it is even inevitable. The only thing that is real is your own living awareness that perceives all this and allows it to happen. It alone allows us to act as the moment demands. It is what has an effect.