As frightening and devastating the effect of this virus is having upon many people, I think that the circumstances that we find ourselves in provide a potent psychospiritual transformative opportunity for all of us.

These opportunities often come with huge challenge and difficulty. It’s not a fanciful, sugar-coated, New Age idealistic, ungrounded, disconnected bliss-state I’m referring to.

Spiritual transformation is radical – it goes to our roots – it throws us back upon ourselves, tests our character, pushes our buttons and invites us into a deeper relationship to ourselves and to each other.

The presence of this virus has forced the world to STOP. More than ever we see our planet as one global village, and we are all in the same boat!

In saying these things, I’m not ignoring the amazing people who are working full-on to save lives. Rather, I refer to so many of us who are used to going about our daily lives working, travelling, socialising, going to gyms, theatres, sitting in cafés, etc have been forced to stay in our homes and simplify our lives in order to keep care of ourselves and other people – our neighbours, our country people, the world.

In stopping our world, it has given us the opportunity to look at what matters in our lives, who matters. It tests our characters, bringing out the best and the worst. It might show us the impact we’ve made upon our environment as we gaze out at empty skies, free of pollution, our streets quiet and relatively empty.

It reveals a life in which we don’t have to kill ourselves to live. A chance to stop and smell the roses.

Again. I am not underplaying the stress that the loss of income and the onset of illness and death of family and friends that this is placing upon many people, but it may also make many of us look more closely at the global, economic infrastructures and who it favours and who it undermines.

We may see how hard we have to run in order to stay still, when finally, we are forced to be still.

We can see, more starkly than ever, our over-taxed health systems and how necessary they are and how valuable the NHS is to us here, in the UK!

With our media we can see people dying in our first world countries like we’ve never seen before. The plight of the homeless, disaffected, marginalised, the flooded, burned, stabbed, abused, raped - and now also people like ‘us’ seriously affected by our common threat: COVID-19.

This is no longer a world in which we can psychologically distance ourselves from people who, in some distant remote part of the world, are suffering and dying. This time it is all of us. Our world seems smaller than ever!

This stopping of the world has reduced pollution. Isn’t this what we needed? Our habits, our industry has been polluting our world and causing the severe results of climate change. Maybe the news of climate change, melting ice caps, species extinction, plastic-filled seas, severe weather, flooding and Australia burning didn’t hit home hard enough. Now we get a pandemic, the impact upon our environment gets a reprieve and perhaps, now, we begin to pay more attention to who we all are, our interdependence and the only home that we all share – the Earth. If we don’t learn from this maybe the next lesson will be harder still!

In this unprecedented situation we see a relatively few, frightened people acting greedily to hoard what they need, and we feel the impact it makes upon the rest of us. Isn’t this a metaphor for global distribution of wealth?

We also see the best of people’s humour with the constant memes and videos that we all share to keep morale up.

Perhaps, we can see the value of slowing down and being with ourselves and our feelings, to allow creativity to flow, catch up on reading, writing, listening to music, making music, going within, meditation and singing and dancing out our feelings. Whatever keeps our energy moving and our hearts open.

We see a world in which physical distancing faces us with our need to connect to one another in ways that are more emotionally available than our ‘water cooler’ gossip or endless, trivial chatter.

In having to keep apart in order to look after one another we come together in new ways, with more openness and cooperation.

The daily news is about all of us involved in facing the same fate. We are presented with a manifestation of our oneness which, potentially, we could realise on deeper and deeper levels.

The lessons for a global spiritual revolution and transformation are in place; it just needs enough of us to be touched deeply enough by them and to respond accordingly.

Do we want to come back from this and return to ‘business as usual’? Or, do we want to live our lives in new, saner ways referent to the world, nature and humanity as a whole rather than as disparate groups of cells each with their own agendas, destroying the ‘whole’ in order to progress like a cancer?

Can this be the end of the world or the end of the world as we know it and a step into a new world of united humanity? We shall see!

By David Sumeray