COVID-19’s Fierce Subversion of Our Supposed Separateness: Cultivating Life With and For All Others

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is not only a biological crisis but a psychological, sociocultural, economic, and spiritual one. Our most grave threat is not the coronavirus itself, but what we do in response. The understandable fear generated by the real dangers of this plague could reinforce a foundational confusion that recurrently brings suffering to us and all our relations: Namely, the dissociative fantasy that I am merely a separate, skin-bounded, autonomous, sovereign self. Fear and greed tend to follow this from this mistakenly contracted identity. Alternately, in fierce ways we would have never wished for, today’s circumstances may be fostering a transformation of consciousness and culture. COVID-19 could subvert our supposedly separate self-sense, world-view, and way of being with others; disclose the “interrelated structure of reality” (as Dr. King put it); highlight the ethical implications that inherently come with it; and summon forth our loving, compassionate responsibility. Working with theoretical ideas and peoples’ actual lived experience, the present article offers suggestions for collaboration—with and for all others—in this precarious time. Insights from humanistic, existential, phenomenological, and transpersonal psychology are set into dialogue with recent examples from daily life.