You thought your cruel orgy would continue unchecked? || Acharya Prashant, on COVID-19 (2020)

Questioner (Q): Sir, everything was going alright back in November 2019; the world was operating as it does. And within three months, everything has just turned upside-down. We’re talking about the Corona outbreak.

It has always been enlightening sitting with you and talking about life. Most of us today are stunned, are not able to make a sense of what has hit us like a bolt from the blue; epecially the well-to-do western nations. For them, the Corona outbreak is like a pretty good-to-go picnic party unjustly interrupted. Where did it all come from? Where is it going to?

Acharya Prashant (AP): So, the picnic, as you say, has been unjustly interrupted. Somebody broke the party. It’s in the partying itself that the genesis of this situation lies. It’s just that the manifest results of our actions take time to show up and they show up only episodically. It’s not a continuum; it’s not as if you act right now and in the same moment you will receive the tangible result of your action.

So, between the intention, the action, and the gross, manifest result; there is the space of time. That time interval comforts us into feeling that all is well with the kind of life we are living, the kind of centre we are operating from, the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at others, the way we look at the planet, the way we look at the entire chain of ecosystems.

We just keep telling ourselves we must be doing well, because there are no hugely negative repercussions. So, the absence of those repercussions comforts us into a false sense of security and alrightness.