An Esoteric Reflection on the Pandemic:

Most students of the Ageless Wisdom will be familiar with the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths that arose from His enlightenment; simply stated they concern: the truth of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path that leads to the end of suffering. Together, they reveal that the energy of Desire enables us to be active in the world, but without right direction, it degenerates into a craving for the sensations arising from interactions with matter. This craving is the cause of suffering.

This relationship between desire and suffering operates under the great universal Law of Cause and Effect. In Buddhist philosophy it is called “The Law of Dependent Origination,” and is based on Buddha’s simple yet profound formula:

When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that.
When this isn't, that isn't. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.¹

The central agency at work in this formula might be called the germ of desire, the word ‘germ’ variously described as “the origin of something that develops,” the “rudiment of a new organism in an existing one” or “a small mass of living substance capable of developing into an organism or one of its parts.”  In the book, Esoteric Healing, a germ is described as “the first effect of an original cause.” [On Germs, pp 320-1]   With this understanding we can apply the Buddha’s formula to two of the great needs cited in the Alice Bailey writings during the second World War, and see if we can shed some light on how national germs of desire have developed into the global problems of today. She wrote:

“The Axis nations need to grasp the teaching of the Buddha as He enunciated it in the Four Noble Truths; they need to realise that the cause of all sorrow and woe is desire—desire for that which is material.

The United Nations need to learn to apply the Law of Love as enunciated in the life of Christ and to express the truth that ‘no man liveth unto himself’ and no nation either, and that the goal of all human effort is loving understanding, prompted by a programme of love for the whole.”²

From the perspective of the “germs of desire,” we might regard nations as cells of light struggling to grow into a worldwide social organism, but contaminated by a virus that lives within each cell – a parasite that hijacks the cellular processes, encoding the cell proteins with its own desires replacing the synthesis which is essential for the structure, function and regulation of the social organism. While each cell displays a measure of group aspiration and growth towards the light of the Cosmic Christ [the Universal Christ known by different names in different religions], the virus thrives in darkness, replicating itself within the host to further its own separative desires. This viral materialism is evident in most, if not all, nations today, even if is different from the Fascism of the Axis nations during the second world war.

According to the Ageless Wisdom teachings, this involutionary desire for material things was the major sin of the Atlantean civilisation, and when vice and cupidity reached their most ruthless height a law was brought into being to offset the malicious growth. It translates as follows:

"He who lives only for material goods, who sacrifices all virtue in order to gain that which cannot last, will die in life, will find breath failing him, and yet will refuse to think of death until the summons comes."³

The teachings further state that this law marks the origin of tuberculosis, one of the “three main tendencies in the human body” along with cancer and syphilis, that lie behind “every single disease.” We might speculate therefore, that the majority of diseases that affect the lungs and respiratory tract are related to Tuberculosis, which is still one of the top ten causes of death in the world. After more than a century of decline, in the mid-1980’s tuberculosis began to increase until it is now considered to be out of control in many countries.⁴  Added to this, the number of infectious diseases has been growing rapidly since the 1980’s, with more than 12,000 documented outbreaks having infected and killed tens of millions of people around the world.⁵   While the current pandemic fits into this category,  we should bear in mind that pandemics are the anarchic rampage of involutionary lives in the etheric body of the planet, which are indiscriminative and take little note of personal karma.  Every human being has to build an individual body from planetary matter which is tainted from long ages of misspent force; as all human beings grow in the earth’s interconnecting web of life, to a degree, all are susceptible to infectious diseases.

Specifically, tuberculosis is the result of the misuse of the building energy of love-wisdom that nations should be using to create the new world organism in the light of the Christ principle. But while progress was made in the immediate period after 1945, international tensions grew again and the narrow escape from world destruction at the height of the Cold War should have been a salutary lesson for humanity. Instead, a significant opportunity to resume constructing a ‘united nations organism’ was still squandered following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the words of the strategic diplomat, Torgeir E. Fjærtoft:

“I was there at the end of the Cold War in 1989 when a vision of common security by global governance seemed within reach by multilateral diplomacy at the United Nations. Then I watched with growing trepidation how the West led by the US undermined the practically universal acclaim of the Western Normative Project and power by moving from multilateralism to unilateral power and coercion…. My experience from multilateral diplomacy within the UN is that to persuade, you invoke to evoke. That means that to work, an idea must have a strong appeal. The specific wording at any given point in time of UN principles and codifications are but evolving appearances of an underlying idea. This idea, not the evolving appearances, is the reference to which member states relate.” ⁶

How well these words describe the remedy for our times: “invoke to evoke.” Although these observations are made from a western perspective, there are advocates of this spirit of diplomacy in all nations and now is the time of opportunity to empower it.  In the darkness of world crises, ideas shine out in brilliant contrast and carry their most potent appeal.  The pandemic has reignited the vision of world unity and it has to be seized, not allowing the glamours of wealth and status to divert and destroy it once again. Now is the time for the germ of the Christ Light to grow vigorously towards international synthesis.

This is the meaning of the enigmatic biblical phrase “The Desire of All Nations”. A germ of desire lies in the emotional nature of every nation which is “a basis for progress…”  It is “the subtle force behind the ‘flags of all nations’…  behind the flag is a point of power which is the point of inspiration to the soul of the people.” As it germinates, “we shall then have a nation, galvanized into activity by interior spiritual energy… the nation will then be linked up—through the point at the centre—with the source of divine inspiration, which is one for all types, all nations and all races in time and space.”⁷

There is a great spiritual formula that can be used to stimulate the germ of desire in the nations of the world, sometimes referred to as the Sun upon the Square.⁸  A fruitful area of service is to be found here if the intuition suffices to penetrate its meaning and significance to even the smallest degree.

1. Dependent Origination, Rigpa Shedra. Rigpawiki.org
2. A.A. Bailey, Glamour: A World Problem, pp 165-6.
3. A.A. Bailey, Esoteric Healing, p. 232.
4. PD. Davies, The world-wide increase in Tuberculosis,  Annals of Medicine, Vol. 35, 2003.
5. Ian Goldin, Robert Muggah, The world before this coronavirus and after cannot be the same, The Conversation online newsletter.
6. Torgeir E. Fjærtoft, From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Fall of Aleppo. The Decline of Global Governance – and How to Restore it. Wiley Online Library.
7. A.A. Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age, Vol II, pp 272-3.
8. Ibid, pp 305-6