The soul of any phenomenon, like COVID-19 for example, lies “within” the language that we use to describe it, The soul of the phenomenon, here a virus, is that aspect of language least attended to in the various discourses that have quickly sprung up in our response to the virus’ appearance. We treat language today only as a pragmatic tool for communicating information. We totally ignore the depth of language, and therefore ignore what would open up for us if we tarried with the images that are used so casually and instrumentally to convey important information.
So, for example, a USA investigator has located the point at which the virus “leaps” across the gap between species—the so-called “wet markets” of Asia that traffic in wild animals. Wild animals such as bats are indiscriminately slaughtered where ever they are found (he says) and sold for for food. Animals are also captured from all over the world, stuffed into cages with other creatures that, in the wild, would have no contact with them at all. This USA investigator says that these wet markets are a cross between a “torture chamber and filthy laboratory”. After taking us through a grisly tour of one of these markets, he says that, after years of fruitless effort to get these incubators of horror shut down, he now believes that “this is “Mother Nature’s revenge!”
The news program, “World of Pain” quickly moved on of course—there is so much information to get across to the viewer, after all. Maybe he was just using poetic language prosaically to get a point across. He seemed have an ironic/sad smile, as he said it. But what is missing of course is any effort to slow down and move more deeply into that image—an image that surprisingly jumped out in the middle of a sober discourse on how to shut down the wet markets of Asia.
What would happen if we paid more attention to this image of Mother Nature’s revenge as a hint of the soul movement “within” the phenomenon of the COVID-19 virus? We probably won’t but what could be revealed if we did?
The unknown future, in its movement towards existence, i.e. becoming real, begins its “incarnation” through dream, vision, prophecy, augury, oracle. Then it finds articulation in fresh, inceptive language or an art form—a process of transforming mystery into image or word. From there, cultural practices could spring up that articulate and maintain the new vision.
When the scientist/investigator said these words, “Mother Nature’s revenge”, he was seeing, with the ordinary senses, the carnage being done to animals throughout the world. This is the last stage of incarnation of a soul movement. It has now incarnated in the form of a physical horror—too late to change anything!
But the soul movement within this image of Mother Nature’s revenge had been detected for a long time by those individuals who can “see” at a much more subtle level. They see this movement in vision, dream, or other “invisible” appearance. But we belong to a culture, now world-wide, that privileges only those cultural practices that must exclude such “news” from the “other side”, beyond the veil of surface appearances. For us in the West, the final denouement came around the 19th and 20th centuries at which time science and the occult had been harmoniously intertwined until they were irrevocably sundered as Materialism took a death hold on our culture. Those with the capacity to “see” were subsequently ignored as irrelevant. But the dreams and visions kept coming and so those recipients, on top of having to bear the brunt of the unsparing vision or dream, were pilloried or pathologised as psychotic, or dismissed as irrelevant.
Now we have arrived where the effects of COVID-19 reveal to the senses what the “inner eye” had known for centuries: We have separated our human nature from animal nature to such a degree that there had to be response by Nature to our profound alienation from Nature, via the absolute denial of our own animal nature. I can’t think of any reason we would so insanely empty our super markets of toilet paper, other than a terror of getting caught with our pants down at the “call of nature”, with no means of making it all disappear again.
I had a dream-vision in 1995. I may as well now call it Nature’s Revenge (the entire dream-vision may be found here):
I am working at a thermonuclear facility along with others. It is the central facility of our society. It is regulated and master-minded by a central computer, much like HAL in ‘2001’, even to the detail of the red eye with which we could communicate. This computer is female. Everybody thought of her as an IT!… In other words, the feminine regulating principle which is the glue of society, by relating all parts to one another and to the whole has become an IT! Slowly the lack of relatedness begins to drive her mad with grief. At first, this madness showed up as an increasing, dangerous autonomy in the operation of the objects associated with the facility (society)—elevators going sideways, doors opening and shutting autonomously, etc. Then people began to harm one another in various ways until the social system became frayed and anarchy increased, with civilisation and its values losing cohesion and crumbling…Then I am standing at the centre of the facility. It is Ground Zero…She is going to destroy us all and this means herself in an apocalypse of rage-despair, loathing, hate, and grief because of our stupidity.
I have worked in response to this vision for over twenty years in order to develop cultural practices that would articulate and support the truth of this vision. It was a work with inceptive language, as my books and essays show. The soul process of incarnation has now, however, sunk below the level of inceptive or poetic language, into pragmatic language, congealing as physical horror in the sense-world.
It’s now too late for any response other than literally “going-through” the consequences of Nature’s Revenge, in real life—the literal acting-out of my and other individuals’ visions.
We must now literally face Nature’s Revenge!
