Deeper Dimensions of the Global Crisis – Part II
by Igor Kufayev
This takes us to the healing phase, or the recovery. There’s so much information out there now. Again, even if only to borrow astrological reports—especially Jyotisha, the Vedic, Indian astrology—the very position of the planets signify the obsession in social media with what we’re going through currently. Even what is now happening in social media is governed or, if you will, directed through these invisible threads by the way we all are obsessively observing and adding voices into this. And there are a myriad of these voices, myriad of these perspectives. But we can narrow these perspectives into several mainstream ones. What I would like to speak to is the importance of attention. But before that—before we touch upon the importance of where we give our attention to during this time—I want to emphasize that this address is not for the layman. I’m sorry: I have to make it very direct. This address is for a spiritually-minded, emotionally-evolved, responsible individual; it’s not for someone who wants to just get this off of their list, get yet another perspective, then run for another perspective, and then run for one hundred other perspectives—just to end up with total confusion and mess. It’s the time of clarity that is now required more than ever. Time of clarity. And the conditions have already been given. This whole lock-in, if you will, this whole pandemic, which is now being dealt with by governments in this drastic measure of having to impose the homebound quarantine for most of the people, is a perfect opportunity for this internalization. But how many people will exercise that? Think about it. Be honest with yourself. How many people will actually take this opportunity to internalize? If someone thinks staying indoors is internalization—being on the computer all day and watching all this stuff, reading, watching more, and adding more and more—that’s not internalizing at all. That’s missing the opportunity altogether for actually getting in touch with that what we seldom have courage to face. And that can be done only alone. It cannot be even done at the table, in discussion with your siblings, parents, loved ones. It can only be done, if you will, face to face when we face our own self.
But hey, this is not for me to say what should or shouldn’t be done—it’s simply an observation. If someone thinks that this is the most horrible calamity that we’ve ever faced, maybe that’s the outer manifestations of that calamity. Maybe it’s the drastic nature of how it all rapidly happened. But the pandemic is happening at various levels of creation, and at various levels, if you will, of our current affairs. One of the longest pandemics was the pandemic which is associated with the industrial way of meat consumption. It’s a global pandemic. It doesn’t bite or sting as the coronavirus, but it has more devastating repercussions long-term than any virus we can essentially be attacked by, if we can put this in that way. Because the world recovered from the Spanish Flu of 1917-1918, although the proportion of the fatalities was incomparable to anything that we’ve known in history in terms of the proportion to the global population and those who have perished. And the world very quickly recovered from it. Recovered, in a way, at one level, only to succumb to another virus almost just a decade after—Europe was turned into a Holocaust. It’s the worst virus ever to affect humankind in the more recent history. How many millions that perished, again, is mind-boggling. What have we learned? No, we have learned nothing. We have not learned anything because if we did, then there would not be any of that what we are witnessing now on the horizontal plane of affairs in terms of the military emphasis that the most developed countries emphasize and put all of their energy into so as to compete in the geopolitical domination of this world.
So of course, this is very bleak picture. And I’m not painting it—it’s already painted. It’s painted, and you can see it for yourself. Because it is we who painted it together, you see? It is I who painted it. I am the only author here—there’s no one else involved. If I can have that understanding, then it is in me where the reconciliation can take place. If the responsibility is shoveled on to someone else—on the neighbor, neighboring country, neighboring state, far away country, far away state, far away affairs—then that reconciliation doesn’t have a chance in this lifetime. Therefore, this address is only for those who are willing to look into it from this deeply personal, internal state of affairs.
Now, back to the recovery—back to the healing and self-healing. So let me just say something here that I have noted myself earlier. “Healing is spontaneous, but only when there is an unobstructed flow of energy throughout the entirety of a human being, which is exemplified in a harmonious relationship between the emotional and psychic with the all-pervading Absolute.” In other words, this very New Age notion that “the body can heal itself” must be understood and re-evaluated in these terms; otherwise, we are in danger of glamorizing the physical mechanism of what this body is. And it is wishful thinking, because the body doesn’t exist on its own. The body is an expression of our soul. We borrow the body, we choose the body, when this moment of, if you will, incarnation takes place—when we descend into what is being developed as a fetus, in the aftermath of copulation. And this genetic material, along with the predisposition that is carried through the sperm of the father which is the soul material, with the given genetic material by the mother—by the fertilized egg—is grown into some life. And that life is, if you will, inhabited, taken over by the soul. So the body then develops in such a way that the soul will have the best possible way to experience the next evolutionary turn, if you put it this way. But to speak about the physicality of the body, as it is, is an oxymoron—it doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as the physical body. Therefore, in examining how to get better, how to get rid of this or that illness, this or that disease, medicine soon or later will stumble. It will stumble in the darkness and will begin to enter the path which, if you will, modern medicine was forced to enter: where it will pursue a very different realm of exploration because it dismissed, separated, cut off the body from the soul.
So that separation is what we’re experiencing now. It’s the most dear price, the most painful price, that we’re paying. In other words, the recovery can only take place with the realignment of the total potential that our psycho-organism here represents. Because the body is an expression of Spirit, with the subtle realm—exemplified by our emotional and psychic bodies—that lays the blueprint for all the mechanics of the physical organism. This is a very, if you will, important understanding in terms of the recovery.
So the healing here is taking place—with the magnitude of this pandemic, in terms of the unknown nature of it all—and must be faced, and must be dealt with from the level of where we bring that reconciliation. How do we do that? What are now the tools of the spiritually-minded one? And this by now should be another rule of thumb, or one of the first and primal rules of thumb. Because this belongs to the preventive, this belongs to how to prevent the calamity. It belongs to that invincibility of who we are. And for that, there has to be unwavering identification with the immortality of our soul. There has to be an unwavering understanding of the nature of the all-pervasiveness of who we are as Being, so that we live from the place of Being rather than from the place of physical experience, which Being here illumines. You see the difference? It’s not living from the physicality of the experience, even if the physicality of the experience is always here to overtake, always here to usurp that experience, at least in our day and age—at least in the Age of Ignorance. So our job here is to turn it completely upside down or inside out. Our job here is to have that unwavering, powerful understanding of who we are as beings. This is one of the greatest preventives. This makes our individual field resilient. By field, I’m talking about the individual existence still as the body, within the body, which makes our ahamkara, that which is responsible for the preservation of this organism intact, coated in that protective, if you will, layer. It makes our aura irresistible and resilient. Resilient to all, if you will, invaders from the outside, here spoken of in terms of these undesirable consequences of being exposed to this or that.
I’m not saying that one can rely on this only, because this will only work when the tantamount of all this is being brought forth. When there is a complete conviction, and that conviction resonates throughout the entire level of our being, at a cellular level—and at the level of the lifeforce—when we have this unwavering identity with the immortality of the essence of who we are. Where we know we are simply not perishable beings. Then that’s what makes us truly able to face anything in life—any calamity, any virus, any circumstance, any crisis.
So that is the first and foremost preventive. This is what we ought to be established in. And with that goes in descending order, in concessive order—we make this concession—the necessity for upholding the vibrations that are harmonious. With all that monistic understanding that all this is Oneness and nothing else—all this is essentially Consciousness watching Its own play—we still have our responsibility in placing the attention to harmonious, balancing vibrations so as to uphold these principles in life at the horizontal level. This is our primal responsibility. And this is also where a lot of spiritual seekers forget—when they have some brush with realization or think that they’ve grokked it, and they feel that they are above it all—essentially, they begin to behave in such a manner that in no time they can become the embodiments of very negative forms of energy. I can give you examples, not mentioning any names, of how some people who claim to have undergone profound awakening became—well, I’m sorry—deluded in the way that they spread around all these bizarre theories, including those terrifying conspiracy theories which “ought to keep us opened to how reality is, and how we’ve been manipulated by some higher power” and all that nonsense of the reptilian race. It’s delusional. Only a being who has lost, at some point, humbleness, can begin to play with the unconscious pattern at the collective level where the feeling of victimization is being constantly agitated. So I want to warn all of us—those of you who are watching right now—how important it is, right at this very moment, not to give in to these outlandish, bizarre, and quite frankly, deluded theories because they only bring more fear. And it’s not at all what is required and what a highly evolved being would be doing, because that’s essentially counter to one’s duty. It’s an act of adharma—something that further violates the field of action. The field of action is so violated now that it requires a painstaking healing job. More and more balance is required. Sattva is required at the collective level—none of that scary stuff that is being brought. So be aware of what you give your attention to. This is what I wanted to mention with regard to this.
Before we go into this, I want to speak a little bit to [the subject of] all governments—where a lot of conspiracy theorists find fertile ground to build their imaginary castles. Where they build their ideas that there is some elite race, elite group of people, who manipulate reality and so forth, and that the governments are here to get us. First of all, the responsibility, again, of a spiritually-minded being is to have clarity as to what a government really represents—the government of any country, without exception. Any government and any leader of a country is nothing other than the collective consciousness manifesting in that group of people or in a single individual. So it doesn’t matter whether we’re having a dictator or an enlightened ruler—it’s not because some nation suddenly got lucky or some nation suddenly got revolutionary about it and they elected this government. No, this is all happening at the subtler levels of reality. Leaders of the country, leaders of any kind, are a manifestation of the collective level of consciousness. When this understanding dawns, we no longer place responsibility on our governments, leaders, or our political leaders—on presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, and so forth. We no longer place our bets and our freedom on these, if you will, speculative grounds, because we all are in it as Oneness again. And I always say that one needs to educate oneself when it comes to this, because one area that I have noticed that still causes a lot of havoc and confusion in even ripe and mature spiritual seekers and finders—spiritual beings—is this attitude towards political affairs. And often I give some antidote to them, like a bit of homeopathy. “Try the opposite of that! You don’t like the president of this country? You don’t like Donald Trump? Well, guess what—it’s the Trumpness in you that you despise much!” And this is the most difficult thing to do—to look at the leader of the country through this understanding: what does it remind you of? what does it bring forth? what shadowy, unseen, unconscious area of myself that I still have to deal with? So with this understanding, these conspiracy theories fall flat on their face. They have no ground, because there’s no one to get anyone. No one is there to usurp my freedom—I am sorry. I stand here as the entire universe. I stand here as a Totality of Being. No one has sovereignty over me. No one can ever have sovereignty over me. Because I am who I am. And this is your responsibility as a spiritually-minded being to have that engrained in your heart. Then and only then that freedom that your soul desires will be yours, because you have the audacity to claim it. These conspiracy theories are all lived because of that victim pattern. It has grounds only because this sense of victimization—when it reaches global collective proportions—manifests in the form of this: that someone is there to usurp our freedom and to turn us into slaves for their own end. So don’t buy into that. You need to have the ground where you stand firmly. And this ground has been just outlined very simply, in very accessible direct words: that no one has sovereignty over me, because I am who I am. You need to have that clearly worked out, each on your own.
I would like to give our attention to what I consider to be very important in this moment in time as part of that global healing—as part of that, if you will, phase—which we’ve outlined at the beginning. First we diagnose—we go through a diagnosis of what is happening to us at the collective level. Then we undergo treatment, and this treatment leads to recovery. So the recovery has to have these elements where we increase this quality in order to prevent anything [else] to take precedence over the lightness of being and why we are here. We are here to experience love, joy, freedom, and all this—of course, not without these cataclysmic events—because these cataclysmic events are what very quickly puts things into perspective. So in a way, the silver lining here is astonishing; but then again, we just spoke about not giving into dark, murky, conspiracy perspectives. Likewise, I would warn us from giving into this powdered, rosy, peachy, terrible perspective of how fantastic everything is because [there are] swans in Venice, blue skies, and the atmosphere is clearing up—don’t give into all this because a lot of that is fabricated by social media. A lot of that is a bizarre way of how things get manipulated. It’s just that sometimes maybe someone is doing it as a playful sport, and then it suddenly gains momentum and becomes the most watched, the most liked [content]. Social media—the disease, the virus, that we all are being affected and infected by—is not as deadly as coronavirus, let alone other viruses, but it’s deadly in the long run because it numbs us from reality. A lot of it is untrue, fabricated, false, simple lies. So let’s also be selective here, discriminant. Exercise a discerning eye, that degree of connoisseurship. Don’t be served some nasty drinks, like some vinegar. If someone says to you, “This is a magnificent wine”—it is not. It’s just that—sour vinegar. Not even good to dress my salad with.
So what roles do emotions have here? They play a profoundly important role, just as when we spoke earlier about healthy, right emotions with regard to the health of our psyche in this connection to the all-pervasive reality of who we are. Emotions here play a tremendously important role. And right now, it is paramount to our state of well-being because we can literally drive ourselves insane if we are not really strong enough. If we are not really connected enough, we can be taken outside of our wits and we can really lose it because of a pandemic of another kind that is unfolding in parallel to this. And that pandemic is driven by all forms of disinformation and misinformation and misinterpretation. So, in other words, the show must go on. Remember that song by Freddie Mercury? “The Show Must Go On.” It’s a beautiful song, powerful. A testimony of courage when faced with the inevitable, as we know that Freddie Mercury was already diagnosed with a terminal illness which there was no treatment for at the time. And, he gave it his best. He stands as this icon—controversial, unorthodox—but still an icon of his generation and the sheer beauty that he shared. He was arguably one of the most beautiful voices of his time—maybe of that whole era of that pop-rock, hard-rock, heavy metal, all that—the most astonishingly versatile vocalist that I know of. With his incredibly versatile range, he always hit the right note—always hit the right note within—that right emotive state.
We are not speaking of emotions here as in taking out the violins and starting to take out the handkerchiefs—but there is something to that. So I’d like us to build a little bit on it. So we’re speaking to is the role emotions play—elevating us or bringing us down—at the time when maintaining balance is our foremost priority. It’s our foremost responsibility. Therefore, culturing what cannot be curbed is our aim now, is our goal. Because we cannot control and withdraw our emotions—it’s impossible. There is this whole perspective that gave birth to some of the most beautiful, if you will, philosophies that have ever been born in India: the whole concept that we are here, in this form, for the sake of experiencing certain emotions. And classical, ancient Indian music is inseparable from this whole theory, because it’s linked to this whole notion of this rasa and rag. Rasa as that juice, essence; and raga as a mode of expression, that passion. Each raga is there to produce a certain emotional tonality, certain emotional resonance, known as bhava. And it brings about a certain emotion. So, I’m not going to go into these theories—it’s very intricate. If you are interested, it’s a fascinating science in its own right which lays the foundation to theater, dance, and lots of classical forms of Indian art—but in music it’s paramount.
So the attention is the highest currency of the moment, and we must be conscious what we give our attention to specifically. And we cannot really shut ourselves down—because that is also a symptom, if you will, or a syndrome, of certain dissociative states where we simply shut ourselves down as if nothing is happening. It’s neither productive nor does it really do anything for us, because who wants to be in a state of numbness? At the same time, we don’t want to wear ourselves out, and we don’t want to, as said earlier, to go out to lose our minds, to put it mildly. Therefore as part of this, if you will, recovery, rehabilitation phase, is giving expressive potentiality to certain emotions that one way or the other, we are being in touch with now—right now, more than ever. Right now—more than, let’s say, three weeks ago, let alone three months ago or three years ago—is this resonance where everything, every melody… Just go back to your favorite compositions, your favorite movements, or discover new movements—I’m talking about music now. Because music here is the closest expression—as an example was given with rasa, raga, and bhava—music comes closest to express what we feel. Music comes closest to what we feel, what we cannot express in any other way. So the very noble purpose of music is to give us that direct taste, sense, of what otherwise is rooted in Heaven, not even in Earth. This whole concept of Gandharva Veda, these melodies of nature which lay at the origin of all classical Indian music, has this concept that gandharva is the region where very refined forms of energy reside. And we are connected to these, if you will, realms through our emotions, because our emotions gain providence from these realms. And people who happen to be amazing musically in any way, one way or the other, gain that, if you will—or come from that region. It’s like we could say beings born with an extraordinary gift of playing or composing, singing, performing music, have the capacity to convey that what otherwise is unconveyable. So in this time, it’s very important to give acknowledgement to these emotions, because that’s what makes us sane. That’s what finds an outlet to these emotions that rise to the surface in the face of what is happening.
I’m speaking here both in terms of the pacifying nature of music, pacifying nature of vibrations, that one must be exposed to every day, because not everyone lives in a extraordinary place where nature plays these tunes. If you live near the streams, waterfalls, the forests, ocean shores, then you might have that ambient sound all the time—but even then. I’m talking to the majority of us who don’t have that luxury; therefore, giving ourselves to this on a daily basis is very important right now. And being fully alive right now, and alive not with our heads lost in this social media chaos just getting more information, “What is happening?”—but being able to reconnect to this what is so eager to be acknowledged. Because that, by definition, is the root cause of this whole crisis: some form of energy has not had the chance to be expressed for too long. It’s being lying there heavily, in the subconscious and unconscious layers, and is collectively now manifesting at the existential proportions. So it is our duty as spiritual warriors—as, if you will, holders of light—to not give into grosser forms of energy now. Ask yourself, how do you feel at the end of the day? Do you feel heavy? How do you wake up? Do you wake up with a heavy heart? Do you wake up with a heaviness in your chest, in your body? Acknowledge it—if yes, then you need to do something. You need to give yourself a day free of any exposure to any negative form of information so that you can restore the balance. It’s very important right now. The same goes, of course, for spiritual methodologies—and we will be holding gatherings online, meetings with the sangha—because this is paramount to what this whole work is about. So we will be speaking of how to deal with this now, and what is required from all of us who have been given a methodology and have had due experiences with how to work with this. But in this open format of broadcasting, I just want to encourage all of you to give this time to more introversion, meditation—to acceptance, to surrender—so as to basically keep the balance intact. Because it’s not going to be here for too long—but let’s not miss an opportunity. Let’s not just hope that it’s going to be sorted out for us without our involvement. In other words, dealing with it all. It’s our responsibility to transform the lower order of emotions into higher ones—whatever that means. You need to know how to work with this. With the most primitive emotions of course—that emotion of fear is the most primitive one, so dealing with that fear. And acknowledging that fear, not adding to that fear—neither adding that voice of fear out into the world nor consuming that in any way that increases that.
— Igor Kufayev, extract from a live broadcast streamed by Igor Kufayev during the COVID-19 pandemic, March 28, 2020.
Watch the video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhGVbqrZYds&t=4992s